Having gotten that out of the way, it’s also worth learning that while some of these state programs (especially Florida’s) are models of sound policy, efficient administration, and careful targeting of available resources, some others appear to be burdened by dubious practices on the part of schools, donors, elected officials, and maybe parents, too.

First, a brief refresher on what these programs are and how they work. Eight states allow individuals or corporations to take a full or partial credit against their state taxes for contributions they make to nonprofit groups that award private school scholarships. Some states, like Florida, award scholarships only to low-income students. Others, such as the programs in Arizona and Georgia, place no income restrictions on eligibility. None excludes participation in religious schooling (and, in fact, the majority of scholarship students attend faith-based schools).

Yes, they are cousins of voucher programs but they don’t involve checks written by the state (or district) to private schools, using money that has already entered the public coffers. The money, in fact, never enters the state treasury. Such programs thus skirt some of the statutory and constitutional obstacles that get in the way of vouchers—and in many cases enjoy smoother political sailing as well.

If Ms. Saul is to be believed, however, some of these programs are vulnerable to various forms of misbehavior, including parents getting cash in their pockets, politicians deciding which schools should benefit, even donors getting tax credits while underwriting particular students.

These programs involve credits against state taxes. Hence a state’s tax code determines what is and isn’t kosher. Certainly some of these alleged practices wouldn’t be acceptable to the Internal Revenue Service. (For example, one cannot make a federally-deductible gift to a college or school that is then used to provide tuition relief to one’s own kid. If that were allowed, nobody would pay tuition to Princeton; they’d make gifts instead—and benefit from the tax deduction.)

Even in Ms. Saul’s telling, it’s evident (from the Florida example) that such programs can be meticulously designed, well-run and close to fool-proof. But it also appears that some are loosey-goosey and vulnerable to chicanery. Which raises the question of whose job is it to set them right on behalf of the kids, parents, educators, and taxpayers who have every reason to expect that?

The state, of course, should do much of this. It’s a state program and the state equivalent of the IRS should be monitoring its collection and distribution of money. State watchdog agencies, too, should ensure that taxpayers are benefitting, as has happened in Florida. The state education department (or local school system) should be ensuring that the kids who benefit from it are attending bona fide schools that satisfy whatever are the applicable requirements for private schools to operate in that jurisdiction. And legislatures should examine the academic impact of these programs, as greater transparency often weeds out schools with shaky credentials and questionable business practices.

But aspects of this go well beyond state government and could well be superior to it. Should the private school “community,” such as it is, be monitoring its own members for their participation in and handling of such aid programs? (What is the Council for American Private Education and its state affiliates for?) How about the accrediting bodies that typically review many aspects of private schools and allow them (if they pass muster) to declare that they are accredited? What about advocacy groups (such as the American Federation for Children) that press for the expansion and replication of such programs and that presumably have an interest in their integrity and reputation? The private foundations (e.g. Friedman, Walton, DeVos) that underwrite such efforts? Why does this sector of school choice have no counterpart to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) to promulgate a code of sound practices and invite membership from organizations that adhere to these?

The more such entities do to ensure sound practices in state-level tax-credit scholarship programs, the less temptation there will be for government agencies to clamp down on them, with likely adverse effects on legitimate schools and needy pupils.

And the less hostile publications like the Times and gotcha journalists like Ms. Saul will have with which to make mischief.

PS: It’s not just “private” and “profit” that she abhors. Her piece on Tuesday was really a model of take-no-prisoners left-wing journalism! She hit at least five hot buttons: privatization, football, evolution, fundamentalism, and fracking! Somehow she missed climate change, phonics, and traditional family units.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Adam Emerson

Ed. note: Adam Emerson previously contributed to policy and public affairs initiatives for Step Up For Students, the scholarship organization responsible for administering the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students.

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

If the effort succeeds, the state’s educator-evaluation system—which measures teachers’ impact on student learning—would become a primary component of school personnel policies. Teachers’ unions themselves collaborated with the state education department to create the evaluation system. But the unions oppose tying the evaluations to key staffing decisions. At present, seniority drives layoff and transfer policies in many districts.

Although Massachusetts is often hailed as a leader in public education, underachievement is common among poor and minority students. In a survey of the state’s schools, Stand for Children—the nonprofit leading the ballot-initiative effort—found that quality-blind staffing policies are more common in low-income districts. For example, the survey found that 58 percent of those districts have contract language establishing reverse-seniority layoffs for tenured teachers, compared to only 34 percent of wealthier districts.

Stand for Children made a prudent choice by taking this proposal to the ballot box. After all, the Democratic state legislature wouldn’t have enacted this law on its own. Yet most voters seem to agree that classroom effectiveness should motivate teacher-staffing policies. Ballot-initiative procedures—which are a Progressive Era reform—were designed for situations like this: Through the ballot box, the electorate can circumvent special interest-driven legislatures and directly enact popular laws. In reality, however, special-interest groups can be hugely influential in ballot-initiative campaigns.

The state’s largest teachers’ union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, is taking a kitchen-sink approach to defeat Stand for Children’s proposal. The union filed a lawsuit earlier this year to prevent voters from even deciding the issue. The lawsuit—which raises three fairly technical claims based on the state’s constitutional requirements for ballot initiatives—alleges that the state attorney general erred by certifying the proposal to appear on this year’s ballot.

Experts predict that the union’s legal challenge will fail. “It strikes me as a Hail Mary lawsuit,” said Leslie Graves of the website Ballotpedia. Similarly, Professor Jonathan Matsusaka, who is president of the Initiative and Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California, said that the union’s claims amount to a “big stretch.”

Even Peter Enrich, a Northeastern University law professor who opposes the initiative on policy grounds, said that the lawsuit is weak. “I understand why the plaintiffs don’t want this question on the ballot,” he said. “But when you look at the claims with an eye to the state constitution, they are reaches.”

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court heard oral arguments in the case earlier this month. A decision is expected by mid-July.

If its legal claims are losers, why did the union ever bother filing suit?  Ms. Graves of Ballotpedia has a few explanations. For starters, judges can be unpredictable and so seemingly weak claims sometimes succeed. And it may have been worth rolling the dice when the lawsuit’s costs will amount to little more than the union’s lawyers’ time. In comparison, a full-blown advertising campaign against the initiative could carry a price tag in the millions. Thus, the potential savings may be worth the effort of drafting some papers and making a few court appearances. Finally, lawsuits attract media attention and create public-relations opportunities, which may serve as a cheap way for the union to launch its broader campaign against the proposal.

Teachers’ unions have some advantages going into the campaign. “The electorate is sympathetic to teachers,” said Professor Matsusak, “and teachers have proven to be highly effective politically as a result.” Thus, teachers’ unions may jam local media with ads of educators encouraging voters to oppose the initiative. And this strategy may work: In Oregon, teachers’ unions ran an aggressive campaign to help defeat a 2008 proposal that would have required schools to pay teachers based on merit, not seniority. Similarly, the largest teachers’ union in California spent millions to crush a 2000 proposal that would have created a statewide voucher system.

But the Massachusetts initiative still has promise. Public-opinion surveys suggest that the proposal—which ties hiring, firing, and transfer decisions to teacher effectiveness, while still giving some consideration to seniority—may be more popular than the merit-pay or school-voucher proposals. Also, Stand for Children recently kicked off an ambitious advertising campaign, which could rival the unions’ own outreach efforts.

However, status-quo bias is another hurdle for the initiative. “Voters hesitate to upset the world as it is, unless they’re confident that the alternative is going to be better,” said Professor Matsusak, who estimates that nationally about 60 percent of initiatives have failed over the past century. Bias against change could be strong in Massachusetts, where the schools are widely considered to be some of the country’s best.

Voters are particularly hesitant to embrace complex initiatives, said Professor Enrich, who considers Stand for Children’s 16-page proposal “awfully complicated.”  Merit-based staffing is a simple idea. But the reality is that few voters will understand the particulars of the initiative on Election Day. And ads against the proposal will likely stir up voters’ fear of the unknown.

Regardless of the outcome, the Massachusetts proposal could offer a way forward for education reform in other states. About half of the 50 states allow for ballot initiatives. If proposals are tailored to public opinion, the ballot box could be a tool to improve this country’s schools in states where legislatures disappoint.

Mark Osmond, who holds a master’s degree in economics and public policy from Columbia University, is a law student at the University of Michigan. He can be reached at mark.a.osmond@gmail.com.

Yet, despite our student population’s diversity, the number of diverse schools, as imagined by Brown, remains limited. Upwards of 40 percent of black and Latino students still attend racially isolated schools (where white pupils represent less than 10 percent of the enrollment). And the average black or Latino student attends a school that is 75-percent minority. Meanwhile, more than four in five white students attend schools that are majority-white—even though whites barely make up 50 percent of our school population. (All of these data are from Gary Orfield’s Civil Rights Project.)

A long Times article from a few days earlier described in moving terms what this type of racial isolation means for young people. “At Explore, as at many schools in New York City, children trundle from segregated neighborhoods to segregated schools, living a hermetic reality.” One student, Amiyah, tells the reporter: “It’s a bit weird. All my friends are predominantly black, and all the teachers are predominantly white. I think white kids go to different schools. I don’t know. I haven’t seen many white people in a big space before.”

Sure enough, most studies show the benefits of racially and socio-economically mixed schools. Even such luminaries as Eric Hanushek and Caroline Hoxby have found positive peer effects for minority students when they sit in integrated classrooms. Less rigorous research has linked exposure to middle-class students (and their culture) to better life outcomes for poor kids.

The question today, as for the past twenty years or so (when the forcible desegregation movement ran out of steam), is what can be done to better integrate our schools? The Supreme Court no longer allows explicit social engineering by race. And parents have shown—in Wake County, North Carolina and elsewhere—an unwillingness to have their kids forcibly bused to distant schools. (Not that such policies are in line with a free society, anyway.)

But there are at least two reasons for hope. First, contrary to what you might think, the rapid gentrification of many of our great cities is making school integration more feasible than it’s been for decades. As neighborhoods grow more diverse, it’s easier (though not inevitable) for their local schools to become diverse, too. Second, the charter school movement is awakening to the opportunities that charters might play in creating voluntarily integrated schools of choice.

These efforts will struggle, however, with the difficult question of academic diversity. Which brings us to last week’s other solid piece of reporting, this one in the Washington Post, on the topic of differentiated instruction—“in essence, adapting lessons for kids of different abilities within a classroom” rather than tracking or grouping students by ability.

As I wrote in Education Next last year, the wide spread in students’ prior academic achievement is probably the greatest challenge facing teachers today. No classroom is immune. But classes that are racially and socio-economically diverse are likely to have especially large achievement gaps between their high and low performers—creating a nearly impossible instructional task for mere mortals.

Consider a second Hoxby peer-effects study. In 2006, she and Gretchen Weingarth examined the schools in Wake County. For the better part of two decades, that district, in and around Raleigh, had been reassigning lots of kids to different schools every year in order to keep its schools racially and socioeconomically balanced. That created thousands of natural experiments whereby the composition of classrooms changed dramatically but randomly. That, in turn, provided Hoxby and Weingarth an opportunity to investigate the impact of these changes on student achievement.

They found evidence for what they called the “boutique model” of peer effects, “in which students do best when the environment is made to cater to their type.” They wrote: “Our evidence does not suggest that complete segregation of people, by types, is optimal…What our evidence does suggest is that efforts to create interactions between lower and higher types ought to maintain continuity of types.”

What that means for classrooms is that it’s okay for them to contain a range of students (say high, medium, and low achievers), as long as that range is not too wide. What’s pernicious is a “bimodal” distribution of students in the same class: just very high and very low achievers, with few in between. Yet that is precisely the kind of distribution many diverse schools find themselves with. On average, upper-middle-class white students from college-educated two-parent families tend to achieve at very high levels and poor minority students from single-parents homes tend to achieve at very low levels. Put these students in the same classroom and you’ve got a real dilemma.

How on earth can a teacher instruct such a group of pupils effectively? If the answer is to keep kids in separate ability groups all day, then why not just create whole classrooms by ability instead? In schools that are not racially and socio-economically diverse—say, high-poverty inner-city schools, or affluent all-white suburban schools—it’s not as difficult an issue. There you can group students by ability without grouping students by race or class.

In diverse schools, however, such grouping will often (stress often, not always) mean re-segregating students by race and/or class. And what’s the point of an integrated school with segregated classrooms? Which brings us back to “differentiated instruction,” and the hope that somehow a teacher can reach kids of all abilities together.

Squaring this circle is the daunting challenge that diverse schools face. Most will probably land on a combination of strategies—grouping students by achievement level for part of the day, maybe for reading and math, while teaching them heterogeneously in subjects like science, social studies, art, music, and P.E. But schools that refuse to group at all—out of an ideological aversion to “sorting”—will struggle to help all their students achieve at high levels. At least that’s what the best research indicates. And if parents—of all races and classes—see that their own kids aren’t getting what they need, you can kiss those diverse schools goodbye.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry originally appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

Behind the Headline
Is Desegregation Dead?
Education Next | Fall 2010

Integration worked, so why have we rejected it? wonders David Kirp in an op-ed that appeared in Sunday’s New York Times. “If we’re serious about improving educational opportunities, we need to revisit the abandoned policy of school integration,” he concludes.  In the Fall 2010 issue of Education Next, Susan Eaton of Harvard Law School and Steven Rivkin of Amherst College debated the state of the desegregation movement and research on the impact of economic and racial segregation on student achievement.

There is strong evidence that the choice of instructional materials has large effects on student learning—effects that rival in size those that are associated with differences in teacher effectiveness.  For example, in a large-scale methodologically rigorous evaluation of the differential impact of four leading mathematics curricula, second-grade students taught using Saxon Math scored on average 0.17 standard deviations higher in mathematics than students taught using Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley Mathematics.  By way of comparison, the difference in the impact on student achievement of a teacher at the 75^th percentile of effectiveness compared to an average teacher is only 0.11 to 0.15 standard deviations.  But whereas improving teacher quality through changes in the preparation and professional development of teachers and the human resources policies surrounding their employment is challenging, expensive, and time-consuming; making better choices among available instructional materials should be relatively easy, inexpensive, and quick.

Administrators are prevented from making better choices of instructional materials by the lack of evidence on the effectiveness of the materials currently in use.  The vast majority of materials either have no studies of their effectiveness or have no studies that meet reasonable standards of evidence.  Not only is little information available on the effectiveness of most instructional materials, there is also very little systematic information on which materials are being used in which schools.  In every state except one, it is impossible to find out what materials districts are currently using without contacting the districts one at a time to ask.

This scandalous lack of information will only become more troubling as two major policy initiatives—the Common Core standards and efforts to improve teacher effectiveness—are implemented.  Publishers of instructional materials are lining up to declare the alignment of their materials with the Common Core standards using the most superficial of definitions.  The Common Core standards will only have a chance of raising student achievement if they are implemented with high-quality materials, but there is currently no basis to measure the quality of materials.  Efforts to improve teacher effectiveness will also fall short if they focus solely on the selection and retention of teachers and ignore the instructional tools that teachers are given to practice their craft.

In our Brookings Institution report, we show how this problem can be fixed by states with support from the federal government, non-profit organizations, and private philanthropy.  First, state education agencies should collect data from districts on the instructional materials in use in their schools.  The collection of comprehensive and accurate data will require states to survey districts, and in some cases districts may need to survey their schools.  In the near term, many states can quickly glean useful information by requesting purchasing reports from their districts’ finance offices.  Building on these initial efforts, states should look to initiate future efforts to survey teachers, albeit on a more limited basis.

The federal government’s National Center for Education Statistics should aid states in this effort by developing data collection templates for them to use through its Common Education Data Standards (CEDS), and providing guidance on how states can use and share data on instructional materials.  The most recent version of CEDS contains 679 data elements for K–12 education, none of which relate to instructional materials in use.

Organizations with an interest in education reform should support this effort.  For example, the National Governors Association (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) have put their reputations on the line by sponsoring the Common Core State Standards Initiative.  Research based on current and past state standards indicates that this initiative is unlikely to have much of an effect on student achievement in and of itself.  The NGA and CCSSO should put their considerable weight behind the effort to improve the collection of information on instructional materials in order to create an environment in which states, districts, and schools will be able to choose the materials most likely to help students master the content laid out in the Common Core standards.

States facing severe budgetary pressures may be reluctant to undertake new data collection efforts.  Philanthropic organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation for Education could have a major impact by providing the start-up funding needed to collect data on instructional materials and support the research that would put those data to use.

In 1955, educational psychologist Lee J. Cronbach wrote that “The sheer absence of trustworthy fact regarding the text-in-use is amazing.”  It is more than a half-century later and we still don’t know.  How can we tolerate ignorance on something that is as critical to student learning as instructional materials?

Matthew M. Chingos and Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, who are research director and director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, are the authors of Choosing Blindly: Instructional Materials, Teacher Effectiveness, and the Common Core.

Reviewed by A. Graham Down

I can’t think of enough nice things to say about this book.  It is well-written, entirely logical in its constructively skeptical approach, and captures more powerfully than any other book on education that I have read the unintended consequences of exaggerated expectations.

As David Labaree points out, traditionally, schools have been thought of as instruments of social policy, in spite of the tension between individual and collective advancement. This results, predictably enough, in the relative neglect of the academic aspects of schooling.

I am not surprised by the book’s quality; Labaree comes from a long line of distinguished policy analysts (to whom the book is dedicated) at Stanford.  In Chapter 1 he clearly outlines the architecture of the book, a structure he follows to the letter.

He begins by deftly summarizing the history of American education. He catalogues the successes that relate to its assimilative capacity, emphasizing the schools’ central role in shaping the civic complexion of American society through the adoption of the common school approach, while at the same time noting its limitations.  As Labaree puts it, “Educational consumers show a preference for a school system that provides an edge in the competition for jobs more than one which enriches academic achievement.”

The core of this book explains why the various tides of school reform have failed to make a serious dent in the system that had evolved by the late 1920’s.

In his survey, the author writes that the standards movement of the late 20^th century was the first conscious effort to improve the level of student achievement in the various academic subjects.  (Previous reforms had concentrated on issues of access, governance and accountability.)  Regrettably, Labaree chooses to overlook the best efforts of the Council for Basic Education to the contrary (one of my few quibbles – as a former Executive Director and President of the Council – with the author).

However, he does identify the four necessary pre-requisites to effective change – rhetorical agreement, structural considerations (14,000 school systems in a highly decentralized system), teaching practices in the self-contained classroom (3 million public school teachers in 95,000 schools), and, most important of all, student compliance.  In this context, one cannot help but be reminded of Clemenceau’s famous dictum that “..it is easier to move a graveyard than to change a school curriculum.”   Schools are simply relatively impervious to societal change, organized as they are locally and reflecting the values and aspirations of parents, who are typically more nostalgic than realistic in their vision of education.

Finally, David Labaree deliberately resists the temptation to provide a panacea or anything that even looks like a list of recommendations.  On the contrary, he engages in a set of cautionary suggestions.  Like me, he believes that education in its present form is not susceptible to lasting revolutionary change.  Rather, he is a realist who subscribes to the view that “less is more” when it comes to school reform.  Putting it another way, expectations and outcomes need to become both more realistic and attainable if they are to last.  This book should be required reading for both theorists and practitioners in this field.

-A. Graham Down

More book reviews by Graham Down can be found here.

Behind the Headline
All Together Now?
Education Next | Winter 2011

Tracking is out and differentiated instruction is in in school systems across the country. In the Washington Post, Michael Alison Chandler looks at what it means for teachers (preparing three different math lessons and five different reading lessons each day for a class of 19 students) and students in a school in Montgomery County, Md. In the Winter 2011 issue of Ed Next, Mike Petrilli took a close look at a school that has been praised for its success in differentiating instruction.

Today, a lot has changed. Back in 2005, Gates Foundation officials were, for the first time, seriously considering whether to play an active role in shaping public policy. Race to the Top, the Common Core, Democrats for Education Reform, and StudentsFirst were unimagined. No one would seriously suggest New Orleans, Washington, D.C., or Newark as hotbeds of school reform. Diane Ravitch was still a champion of school choice and accountability, and few had heard of Michelle Rhee, Deborah Gist, Jon Schnur, or Geoffrey Canada. No Child Left Behind was still novel and fairly popular, and not a single state was trying to build teacher evaluation around value-added systems.

Today, the world looks real different. These developments all (for better and worse) owe something to policy-oriented giving. “New sector” philanthropy has helped shift the school reform landscape. For a quick glimpse of what’s happened, just compare the biggest givers in 2010 and those a decade before.

According to the Foundation Center, the five biggest K-12 givers in 2010 were:

1. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — $209 million;
2. Walton Family Foundation — $110 million;
3. W.K. Kellogg Foundation — $58 million;
4. Michael and Susan Dell Foundation — $55 million; and
5. Silicon Valley Community Foundation — $35 million

Back in 2000, the Foundation Center reported that they were:

1. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation–$276 million
2. The Annenberg Foundation–$88 million
3. Walton Family Foundation–$48 million
4. J.A. & Kathryn Albertson Foundation, Inc.–$32 million
5. The Ford Foundation–$25 million

While the Gates Foundation has remained the biggest player over the past decade, the Walton Foundation has substantially upped its investment. Meanwhile, once-influential entities like Annenberg and Ford have declined in import.

All this has profound implications for the way we view education philanthropy. As I write in PDK:

A decade ago, a big frustration for edu-philanthropists was the sense that they would invest in exciting programs or practices, but that these never seemed to deliver lasting improvement. A piloted reading or mentoring program would offer promising results, only to disappoint when scaled. Or a foundation would underwrite professional development or a new curriculum for several years, only to see it die on the vine when outside funding dried up. Or funders would help launch dynamic schools, only to see them fall apart when the charismatic founder left.
Where an earlier generation of donors had chalked up the challenges to problems of implementation or program design, the new philanthropists were much more receptive to the notion that the problem was the inhospitable cultures, systems, and policy environments in which those scale-ups were being attempted. New donors who had made their fortunes in the new economy frequently staffed their foundations with Teach For America alums, MBAs, or other nontraditional educators and focused on problems posed by system rigidity, leadership, and policy. The new givers gravitated towards a strategy that rested on three key insights, all sketched out in The Best of Intentions:

First, University of Arkansas professor Jay Greene’s seminal analysis pointed out that the amount of edu-philanthropy is so small that it’s ridiculous to think that investments in programs or practice will have a noticeable impact. Using various approaches, Greene calculated that all private giving combined amounts to perhaps 1% of total K-12 spending — or, maybe, one penny on the dollar. Consequently, he argued that philanthropy only mattered when it funded “high-leverage investments” (e.g. when it altered policies or practices governing the long-term use of the public funds that account for 99% of school spending).

Second, Don McAdams, founder of the Center for Reform of School Systems, argued that philanthropy typically entails limited dollars in the grand scheme of things, but has an outsized influence because this money is nimble and can be used to drive a state or a district’s reforms, where it’s hugely difficult to redeploy more than a sliver of public funds.

Third, a vital piece of leverage was producing research and supporting advocacy in a manner that would shape policy. Policy analyst Andy Rotherham argued that this kind of investment could be aptly captured by the old adage: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Foundation-backed advocacy, research, and proof points that new rules were possible offered a way to alter public policies and priorities.

Back in 2005, I heartily endorsed the policy-centric approach that the contributors had encouraged. I continue to do so today. And I think the results speak to the potential impact of this tack. At the same time, I’ve long wrestled with the repercussions. I’ve worried about foundations being wedded to reformers who tell them what they want to hear, the perils of groupthink, and the disinclination of critics to challenge deep-pocketed funders. And I’ve worried how all of this gets even dicier when foundations are linking arms with the federal government.

I’ve no easy answers, other than the surety that these are questions we need to talk about and openly discuss more frequently, more productively, and with less hostility than has been the norm.

- Rick Hess

This blog entry originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Uncle Sam is dreadful at micromanaging what actually happens in schools and classrooms. What he’s best at is setting agendas and driving priorities. Through a combination of jawboning, incentivizing, regulating, mandating, forbidding, spotlighting, and subsidizing, he can significantly influence the overall direction of the K-12 system and catalyze profound changes in it (though the system is so loosely coupled that these changes occur gradually and incompletely).

It’s just as well that such big directional shifts don’t happen very often, because the change, however gradual, can be wrenching. And it isn’t apt to happen much more often in the future, either, because the “federal government” is no single entity. It is, at minimum, three branches, two political parties, 535 members of Congress, innumerable judges, the White House, the Office of Management and Budget, and umpteen executive-branch agencies—a list that only starts with the U.S. Department of Education. Nearly all of these stars must come into rough alignment before anything important begins to change. And that only occurs once in a while, often under extraordinary political or historical circumstances, usually when the country faces a big challenge, crisis, or widespread injustice.

Let’s look at seven examples of federal “agenda setters” in K-12 education, one per decade.

1950s. One could legitimately cite Sputnik and the National Defense Education Act, but the decade’s real game-changer was the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, striking down government-mandated racial segregation in Southern schools.

1960s. In the name of fostering opportunity, ending poverty, and giving needy kids a boost, President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the modern era of federal aid to K-12 education via the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA, and the Economic Opportunity Act, which incorporated such high-profile programs as Head Start, the Job Corps, and the “domestic Peace Corps” known as VISTA.

1970s. Enacted in 1976, and signed (with some public misgivings) by President Gerald R. Ford, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, now the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, righted another historic wrong by declaring that every youngster with disabilities is entitled to a “free, appropriate public education” in the “least restrictive environment.” Combined with the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the law meant public schools now had an obligation to educate such children in ways that responded to their needs.

1980s. Though nominally just a commission report, A Nation at Risk (1983) told Americans that we faced a crisis of educational achievement and began to nudge the country through a 90-degree change of course from the “equity” agenda of the previous quarter-century to the “excellence” obsession of recent decades, complete with academic standards, tests, and results-based accountability systems.

1990 ushered in the first-ever state-by-state results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress as well as the first-ever reporting of NAEP results according to newly established performance benchmarks. This dual development opened a new era of awareness of academic achievement in the United States and made possible the first bona fide comparisons of state performance at a time when state-based reform was in the ascendancy and governors craved such comparisons. It also launched what amounted to the first real set of standards by which to determine just “how good is good enough” when it comes to student achievement in various subjects.

2001 brought passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, a momentous reauthorization of the ESEA, declaring not only that every single student should become “proficient” in math and reading, but also that every school in the land would have its performance reported, both school wide and for its student demographic subgroups, and that schools failing to make “adequate yearly progress” would face a cascade of sanctions and interventions. NCLB transformed the federal government from funder to would-be reformer of American public education. In the course of becoming a reformer, Uncle Sam also became a regulator as never before.

And the present decade opened with the Race to the Top, the brainchild of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, based on the bold hypothesis that sizable grants of federal dollars, disbursed via a competitive process, can induce states to jump through reform policy hoops that they likely would not otherwise have attempted.

Add them up: America desegregated its schools, with respect both to race and handicap. It inaugurated big-time federal aid to K-12 education, initially in the name of equitable opportunity, now more targeted on academic achievement and gap-closing. It devised new ways of assessing, judging, and comparing achievement across the states—and prodded those states to make politically difficult changes to reform a system that wasn’t producing satisfactory results. And in the process, unsurprisingly, Washington evolved from funder and equalizer into enforcer and regulator.

None of this worked as well as ardent advocates had hoped. All brought unintended consequences, pushback, and sizable financial burdens. But American education is a very different enterprise—and for the most part a better enterprise—as a result of these game-changing initiatives from Washington.

What causes some federal initiatives to function, at least for a while, as positive game-changers, while so many others almost immediately become duds? I see four conditions:

First, there needs to be a sizable, pent-up problem in need of a large solution—a lot of accumulated pressure seeking a release valve. That’s a very different thing from a notional seems-like-a-good-idea or scratch-a-minor-itch add-on to a pre-existing portfolio of programs.

Second, the problem needs to be one that affects the whole country (for example, economic competitiveness, social justice, national security), even if the solution focuses mostly on a region (the segregated South) or significant constituency (kids with disabilities).

Third, the solution needs to be something that can be crafted by implements in the federal toolkit, which is basically limited to financial incentives, regulation of state and district practices, research and data, and litigation or the threat thereof. (And, of course, the bully pulpit itself.)

Fourth, and finally, enough political stars must align—and stay aligned long enough to make a difference.

Not all of them need to be aligned, however. (If they were, the problem would likely have been tackled already.) Congress was not about to outlaw racial segregation in 1954, for example, and plenty of prominent educators declared A Nation at Risk wrong in 1983. Lots of states dragged their heels big-time on No Child Left Behind, and any number of psychometricians denounced the NAEP achievement levels.

But there has to be enough oomph of one kind or another—moral, economic, political, judicial, even occasionally (in the case of school segregation) military—behind these kinds of changes for them to overcome resistance and gain real traction. And when that oomph diminishes—whether because of fresh election returns, limited attention span, newfound prosperity, exhaustion, backlash, or whatever—what remains may be a country with its education direction lastingly changed for the better. Or it may be the husk of yet another federal initiative that was promising at the start but grew stale, obsolete, or oppressive. Or both.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry originally appeared as a commentary in Education Week and is adapted from an essay in the book Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit (Harvard Education Press, 2011).

There’s still an increment, it turns out, but it’s been shrinking: from two years more schooling (by age thirty) for those born in 1955 down to just eight months more for those born in 1980. The implication, quoth the Journal reporters: “Without better educated Americans, economists say, the U.S. won’t be able to maintain high-wage jobs and rising living standards in a competitive global economy.”

This isn’t exactly news. Nor is the Goldin-Katz analysis the first time we have observed that the U.S. is no longer leading the planet when it comes to the quantity of education that its population receives. But is more education—more hours and days, more years and degrees—the cure for what ails us? Or are we already pigging out on the educational equivalent of fast food—fattening but not nutritious—and will supersizing our portions just make matters worse?

If we accept the Goldin-Katz view of what’s wrong with U.S. education, we will inevitably demand more preschool, more full-day Kindergarten, more high school graduations, more college attendance, more college and postgraduate degrees, etc. Supersizing is the standard American response. Indeed, it’s already on the election-year menu with both parties demanding that student-loan interest rates be made to stay low so that more people can afford more tertiary education. Not much talk about quality, though.

Singapore is one of those places that’s been going a mile a minute in boosting both the quality and the quantity of formal education that its population receives. For example, the proportion of Singaporeans aged twenty-five to thirty-nine that completed secondary school (meaning tenth grade) jumped from 25 percent in 1980 to 96 percent in 2010. At the same time, Singapore students beat almost everyone else in the world on international assessments of math and science knowledge.

To an American, however, it’s surprising how little rush there is to supersize Singaporean education. Kindergarten is optional. (The primary schools start at age six or seven.) And only about one in four young Singaporeans currently qualifies for the “junior colleges” (basically grades eleven and twelve) that are the usual path into the country’s four universities. Government policy is headed toward placing 30 percent of the age cohort in public universities; for now, as many as 40 percent of secondary graduates head into career-oriented “polytechnics” that resemble the best of American community colleges and some 20 percent attend the Institute of Technical Education, which emphasizes “hands-on” training.

There is, to be sure, public pressure to increase the number who can enter Singapore’s universities—and some private and non-Singaporean institutions have opened to accommodate some of that demand. (Other students travel overseas for their tertiary education.) But basically nobody is saying that every young person should go to university. And remember: this in an education-obsessed country with no other resources to speak of save its highly skilled populace.

Nor are they going to take the easy path (as England and Hong Kong have done in recent decades and as the U.S. started to do long ago) and put fancier labels onto existing institutions. They are not, for example, going to pretend that their polytechnics are really universities, as we have done with hundreds of ex-teachers colleges and quondam “normal schools.” They regard that kind of maneuver as both an affront to quality control at the university level and damaging to the real-world job-preparation work that the polytechnics specialize in.

The United States, of course, tends to reject both the benefits and the detriments of Singapore-style central planning in the education space, at least when it comes to planning from Washington. But the new Goldin-Katz data, combined with OECD trend data, make clear that our system (or non-system) isn’t doing a very good job of propelling more people onward to get more education than their parents got. And we know from plenty of other data (TIMSS, PISA, etc.) that the quality of much of what they’re getting isn’t so great, either, especially when viewed in international perspective.

Any number of reform initiatives are seeking to tackle one or the other problem. Some are focused on raising academic standards, others on keeping more people in the education system longer and seeing that they emerge with credentials. Some insist that the two goals are complimentary—and the mantra that “everyone should emerge from high school both college and career-ready” tends to blur the distinction and terminate the discussion.

But what will we do when we face hard trade-offs, such as the likely discovery that higher graduation standards will lead to a higher failure (and dropout) rate? Our track record in this regard leaves much to be desired. Even much-envied Massachusetts, which has done a commendable job of getting almost all who stay in school over the medium-high bar set by MCAS, has worrisome dropout rates, particularly among minority youngsters, and has been loath to raise its high school exit-bar to the level of true college readiness.

Are our presidential candidates crazy to yammer about cheap loans to make college more affordable for all? I understand that nobody (except maybe Rick Santorum) is going to campaign for the White House by urging fewer young Americans to go to college. But if more do in fact go and stay, will they really be getting a good education there? Or just a bigger bag of fries? What if, instead, more of them simply emerged career ready from our secondary schools, which already last two years longer than the norm in Singapore? Wouldn’t a whole lot of time and money be saved and a lot of heartache and dashed aspirations avoided?

I don’t expect these dilemmas to be resolved in Washington—though it would be fascinating to hear them discussed by Messrs. Obama and Romney in an upcoming debate. But it’s something our states had better come to grips with—including how they finance their P-20 education systems. It’s clear that rising tertiary education costs paid by consumers—and heavy debt burdens on many who enter and persist in college—are part of the problem. But only part. Maybe more attention to quality would do greater good.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This post originally appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

In December, the organization of conservative state lawmakers adopted two Common Core resolutions in its education committee. One—the subject of the vote tomorrow at the board of directors level—calls on states to back out of the common standards initiative altogether. The second—which has already become ALEC policy—focuses instead on the federal role in the initiative, and tells Uncle Sam to back off.

Here’s the first resolution:

The State Board of Education may not adopt, and the State Department of Education may not implement, the Common Core State Standards developed by the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Any actions taken to adopt or implement the Common Core State Standards as of the effective date of this section are void ab initio. Neither this nor any other statewide education standards may be adopted or implemented without the approval of the Legislature.

And the second:

BE IT RESOLVED, that the {legislative body} vigorously opposes any effort by the federal government to deny the authority of any state to set its own education academic content standards or to attempt to overturn decisions made duly by a state regarding any education standards deemed by the constitutionally-designated authorities in that state to be in the best interest of that state’s children.

So which is the true “conservative” resolution? The one that tells states what to do and demands a one-size-fits-all approach (pulling out of the Common Core)? Or the one that trusts states to make up their own minds—without interference from Washington? If you chose the latter, you will be relieved to know that Mitch Daniels, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, Tony Bennett, and Jeb Bush—Common Core supporters all—agree.

-Mike Petrilli

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Policymakers and reform advocates alike have rallied around the movement toward a national curriculum, suggesting that this will break the stagnation in achievement of U.S. students.  But there is little evidence that confusion about what we should teach has been a real inhibition to student achievement.  In fact, the existing evidence suggests just the opposite:  there is no relationship between the learning standards of the states and student performance.

To be sure, it is a real problem when students in one state learn very different things than those in other states, and in particular when students from some states lack the skills needed for our modern economy.  We really do have a national labor market, and significant numbers of our population end up living and working in a state different than that where they were born and went to school.  The presumption behind having national standards (whether voluntary or coerced) is that having a clearer and more consistent statement of learning objectives across states would tend to lessen the problem of heterogeneous skills that students bring to the labor market.  Again, however, the fundamental problem is lack of minimal skills and not the heterogeneity of skills per se.

Experience provides little support for the argument that just more clearly declaring what we want children to learn will have much impact.   In arguing for focusing on standards, proponents of national standards conventionally point to Massachusetts:  strong standards and top results.  But it is useful to expand thinking from just Massachusetts to include California, a second state noted for its high learning standards.  Indeed, some have argued that both states would have to lower their standards in order to fit into the structure of the Common Core.  But California balances Massachusetts:  strong standards and bottom results.

In order to see the issue more broadly, it is possible to compare state-by-state measures of learning standards to student outcomes.  There are different independent ratings of the quality of the learning standards currently existing for each state, and these can be combined with assessments of student performance from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).  The most comprehensive rating of state standards is probably that of Education Week.   Education Week developed a comprehensive grading across grade-specific standards, testing, and the accountability that goes with them in each state.  This ranking provides aggregate grades for each state.  (Another widely acknowledged rating of state standards by subject is produced by the Fordham Institute.  These competing rankings are correlated with those of Education Week, though not perfectly, and it really makes no difference for the analysis which we use.)

The figure below shows how the ranking of standards compares to NAEP scores – here the 8^th grade math scores.  (The specific NAEP assessment for grade and subject has no influence on the overall conclusions).

As can be seen, the better the state standards the worse the students tend to do.  But, of course, this does not imply that we should move toward weaker standards.  The real conclusion is that state standards have little to do with student performance.

In other words, what really matters is what is actually taught in the classroom.  Simply setting a different goal – even if backed by intensive professional development, new textbooks, and the like – has not historically had much influence as we look across state outcomes.

There are a number of refinements that one can think about for this analysis, but they do not change the answer.  This conclusion holds even under more sophisticated analysis, as demonstrated quite conclusively by Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution.  Indeed his analysis helps to frame the entire debate.

The continuing emphasis on Common Core standards, including the debates about the legality of them, is often interpreted as indicating that the Common Core is a really big deal in school reform.  The data suggest otherwise.

The one possible complementary gain from the move to national standards is that the assessments of performance might become better.  It is widely recognized that the current tests used to judge outcomes within individual states tend to be quite weak.  (This concern about tests is not leveled at NAEP, which was used in the comparisons above, but instead applies to the tests states use for accountability purposes).  If the new standards lead to better tests – something that might come out of the two testing consortia funded by the U.S. Education Department – we might have the basis for improved school policies.  But that is also not certain and cannot be used as a primary justification for the focus on Common Core standards.

One interpretation of the emphasis on developing the Common Core curriculum is that these debates provide a convenient distraction from potentially more intractable fights over bigger reform ideas like teacher evaluations, expanded school choice, or improved accountability systems.    While I am not against having better learning standards, I believe that we cannot be distracted from more fundamental reform of our schools.  The future economic well-being of the U.S. is dependent on improving the achievement and skills of today’s students.

-Eric Hanushek

While Jerry Brown, Tom Torlakson, and Mike Kirst deserve plenty of criticism for their indifference to education reform—kicking charter supporters off the state board, cozying up to the teacher unions—on this one they deserve nothing but kudos.

In a nine-page request (still in draft form for another month), they ask Arne Duncan to allow California to use its own accountability system, the Academic Performance Index (API), and to scrap AYP. Mimicking language Duncan himself has used, they write:

Unrealistic and ever-increasing performance targets have forced us to label 63 percent of Title I schools and 47 percent of districts receiving Title I funds as needing improvement, and to apply sanctions that do not necessarily lead to improved learning for the students in those schools. This practice has confused the public, demoralized teachers, and tied up funds that could have been more precisely targeted on the schools and districts that are most in need of improvement.

But they refuse to meet one of Duncan’s conditions for such flexibility: Namely, the creation of a statewide teacher evaluation system. From Politics K-12:

Why? The cash-strapped state just doesn’t have the funds to help school districts cover the cost of a new evaluation plan, as state law requires, Kirst said.

“We’re saying we just can’t pay for it,” Kirst said. Other states that have applied for the flexibility “must be rich,” he joked.

And, in Kirst’s view, the waiver request is consistent with what’s actually in the NCLB law. “We do not see anything in the law about state mandates for teacher evaluation,” he said.

Amen, amen, amen! Finally, a state willing to call out the Administration on the illegality of its waiver policy. (And a true-blue state at that!)

Let me be clear: I’m not saying California’s request should automatically be approved. There are legitimate questions about API, and whether it’s demanding enough (and sensitive enough to subgroup performance). As with the other states, Duncan has a right to negotiate over the particulars.

But he doesn’t have a right to demand the creation of a teacher evaluation system not mentioned in the law in return. Part of me hopes he’ll turn down the request anyway so that California can sue—and win.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

As impressive and amazing as these results by charter schools may be, it would be wrong to conclude from this that charter schools improve student achievement.  The only way to know with confidence whether charters cause better outcomes is to look at randomized control trials (RCTs) in which students are assigned by lottery to attending a charter school or a traditional public school.  RCTs are like medical experiments where some subjects by chance get the treatment and others by chance do not.  Since the two groups are on average identical, any difference observed in later outcomes can be attributed to the “treatment,” and not to some pre-existing and uncontrolled difference.  We demand this type of evidence before we approve any drug, but the evidence used to justify how our children are educated is usually nowhere near as rigorous.

Happily, we have four RCTs on the effects of charter schools that allow us to know something about the effects of charter schools with high confidence.  Here is what we know:  students in urban areas do significantly better in school if they attend a charter schools than if they attend a traditional public school.  These academic benefits of urban charter schools are quite large. 

In Boston, a team of researchers from MIT, Harvard, Duke, and the University of Michigan, conducted a RCT and found:  “The charter school effects reported here are therefore large enough to reduce the black-white reading gap in middle school by two-thirds.”

A RCT of charter schools in New York City by a Stanford researcher found an even larger effect: “On average, a student who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86 percent of the ‘Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap’ in math and 66 percent of the achievement gap in English.”

The same Stanford researcher conducted an RCT of charter schools in Chicago and found:  “students in charter schools outperformed a comparable group of lotteried-out students who remained in regular Chicago public schools by 5 to 6 percentile points in math and about 5 percentile points in reading…. To put the gains in perspective, it may help to know that 5 to 6 percentile points is just under half of the gap between the average disadvantaged, minority student in Chicago public schools and the average middle-income, nonminority student in a suburban district.”

And the last RCT was a national study conducted by researchers at Mathematica for the US Department of Education.  It found significant gains for disadvantaged students in charter schools but the opposite for wealthy suburban students in charter schools.  They could not determine why the benefits of charters were found only in urban, disadvantaged settings, but their findings are consistent with the three other RCTs that found significant achievement gains for charter students in Boston, Chicago, and New York City.

When you have four RCTs – studies meeting the gold standard of research design – and all four of them agree that charters are of enormous benefit to urban students, you would think everyone would agree that charters should be expanded and supported, at least in urban areas.  If we found the equivalent of halving the black-white test score gap from RCTs from a new cancer drug, everyone would be jumping for joy – even if the benefits were found only for certain types of cancer.

Unfortunately, many people’s views on charter schools are heavily influenced by their political and financial interests rather than the most rigorous evidence.  They don’t want to believe the findings of the four RCTs, so they simply ignore them or cite studies with inferior research designs in which we should have much less confidence.

Progress will be made in our application of research to charter school policies by encouraging everyone to focus on the most rigorous studies, of which we have several.  To do that, supporters of charter schools also have to refrain from citing weaker evidence, which only serves to legitimize the use of inferior studies by charter opponents.  As exciting as the outstanding performance of charter schools is in my own Global Report Card research, that evidence shouldn’t be used to endorse charter schools.  Supporters don’t need to rely on the Global Report Card to make the case for charter schools because they have four gold-standard RCTs on their side.  Opponents of charter schools have no equally rigorous evidence on their side.  And that’s the point we should all be making.

-Jay P. Greene

This blog entry originally appeared on the blog of the George W. Bush Institute for National Charter Schools Week.

Massachusetts supposedly has the best public schools in the United States, and the best of the best are to be found in the affluent Boston suburbs—Belmont, Lexington and Wellesley, for example.

So when these top-flight schools decide that advanced honors courses in physics and chemistry are to be given the same weight in calculating a student’s official grade point average (GPA) as any other course, including cooking, check-book balancing, and make-up algebra, it becomes ever so clear—once again—that the country’s progressive educators have successfully pushed back the forces of school reform.  And it remains no less apparent that these same progressives continue to bash both talent and hard work.

Belmont and Lexington, with Wellesley in hot pursuit, have said that the official GPA shall no longer be boosted if the grades are earned in honors-level courses.  That antiquated practice of recognizing that some courses are more demanding than others creates social divides and denies students genuine course choice, it is thought.

Previously, students who wanted a top level GPA were forced to take the most challenging courses the school had to offer.  Now a student with a perfect GPA can become valedictorian of the class simply by accumulating a set of A’s in any old class whatsoever.

As usual, it’s a student who tells the truth.  “I feel that if you take the harder classes, that should be calculated in your GPA,” the vice president of the Wellesley student council told a Boston Globe reporter.

It is the Wellesley school board that prevaricates. A report from one of its committees told parents that “students who meet the expectation of a course should have a GPA that reflects the grade that they earned.”  (As if earning an A in computer science is the same as one in cooking.) To those who ask questions, school officials say that colleges pay no attention to GPAs anyhow—they look at the actual courses taken.  If it is not an honors course, the student is penalized by the college admissions office, so the change won’t really make any difference to student chances of getting into a good college.  They will need to take the honors courses anyhow.

Left unsaid is the fact that students are being misled when told every course counts the same.

Of course those from sophisticated families will see through the prevarication the education progressives have concocted in the name of social equality.  Those who suffer are only the bright kids from the less sophisticated families who foolishly believe what their school district tells them.

All this would be less painful to watch, were it not for the fact that what is happening in the best schools is inevitably going to shape what occurs elsewhere.

-Paul Peterson

For word nerds, here’s a summary:

• Our nation is falling behind globally as other nations provide increasingly rigorous and widespread education to their people. No surprises there.
• It’s not hard to see why: In contrast to educationally high-performing nations, ours is not selective about who teaches our children. As a result, schools cannot provide the kind of autonomy that great teachers crave. They just can’t have confidence that most teaching professionals will self- lead the rigor-and-innovation infused school cultures great teachers want and students need.


Click to Enlarge

• But excellent teachers literally make all the difference for kids who rely on school for learning opportunity. The top 20-25 percent produce about a half year more learning progress than solid teachers, on average. A child who starts one year behind can catch up in two years and then become an honors student two years later – if the child has excellent teachers four years running. A student who starts stuck in the middle can become an honors student, and then excel like top international peers, with the same run of excellent teachers. In contrast, students who have good, solid teachers every year, or the usual distribution, end up where they started compared to peers.
• Yet only 25% of classes are taught by excellent teachers, ones who achieve this level of student growth on average and who develop students’ higher-order thinking with similar skill. That means 75% of classrooms, and the students in them, are left out.
• What can be done? How about extending the reach of excellent teachers to more students, effectively putting them in charge of all U.S. classrooms and every student? But how?

If you’ve been following our work on this, you know that we released 20+ school model summaries late last year. Last week, we released 10 detailed school models. These models use job redesign and technology to extend the reach of excellent teachers to more students, for more pay. Many let these same teachers help peers produce excellent results, create collaborative work teams and free teachers’ time for additional planning and professional development. And they’re all designed to work within current budgets – generating cost savings that can be used to pay excellent teachers more and meet other school needs.

In each of these models, teachers have career opportunities dependent upon their excellence, leadership, and student impact. Advancement allows more pay and greater reach. These school models are part of our effort – now with numerous partners – to create an “Opportunity Culture” for all U.S. teachers and students. And if you wonder what that really means, well now’s the time to open that infographic.

Of course, policy barrier are plentiful, as we wrote here. But many of the barriers to an Opportunity Culture are barriers of the mind and will.

We hope some practical tools will help willing leaders. We will be releasing more soon – career paths, job descriptions, evaluation tools, a short video to engage teachers in school redesign, and more. Learn more at our new website: OpportunityCulture.org.

-Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel

Behind the Headline
Education and Economic Growth
Education Next | Spring 2008

“In addressing our current fiscal and economic woes, too often we neglect a key ingredient of our nation’s economic future—the human capital produced by our K-12 school system. An improved education system would lead to a dramatically different future for the U.S., because educational outcomes strongly affect economic growth and the distribution of income,” write George Schultz and Eric Hanushek in today’s Wall Street Journal. Eric Hanushek researched the impact of student achievement on economic growth in “Education and Economic Growth,” which appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of EdNext.

Consider: Nine-year-olds at the 10th percentile posted 12 points of progress between 1990 and 2008 on the long-term National Assessment of Educational Progress—10 of those points between 1999 and 2004 alone. (That’s about a grade level’s worth of gains.) Thirteen-year-olds at the 10th percentile posted 7 points of progress from 1990 and 2008. But seventeen-year-olds at the 10th percentile only gained 3 points. (The story is much the same for the 25th percentile.) The story for reading is more sobering, with big gains at the nine-year-old level, a flattening out in middle school, and actually declines in high school.

The question is how to interpret these trends. One hypothesis is about fade-out: The improvements at the elementary level are ephemeral, perhaps because the way math or reading is taught doesn’t set students up for future success. In reading, for example, it’s quite likely that a heavy focus on phonics is helping students to decode better—and post better scores as nine-year-olds—but isn’t giving them the vocabulary or content knowledge to keep making progress in middle school. Another hypothesis is that our high schools aren’t as strong as our elementary schools, perhaps because they haven’t been the focus of as much reform and attention.

Let me float a third theory: Could it be that increased graduation rates are driving down twelfth-grade performance? Recent studies have indicated that graduation rates are up significantly over the past decade; that means that we have twelfth-graders in school today who previously would have dropped out. And those students are likely to be very low-achieving. Could they be pulling down the mean? Just like we see with the SAT as more students—and more lower-income students—take the exam?

I’m not a statistician but it seems plausible to me. Number-crunchers out there: What say ye?

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Behind the Headline
The Flipped Classroom
Education Next | Winter 2012

A new website unveiled by TED helps professors create “flipped classrooms” involving educational YouTube videos and interactive lessons. The website, which is both a portal for finding education videos and a tool for flipping them, is the second phase of an education effort called TED-Ed. In the Winter 2012 issue of EdNext, Bill Tucker discussed the merits of flipped instruction, which reorganizes teaching time so that students work through problems with material in class and view recorded lectures on the lesson material at home.

Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff have carried out a remarkable study, but I suspect it will be misinterpreted.

The main contribution of their research is quantifying the importance of teaching. Specifically, the authors conclude that students taught by a more effective teacher will collectively earn hundreds of thousands of dollars more over their lifetimes, and that good teachers similarly influence college going and teenage pregnancy. Because each teacher influences thousands of students over a career, this suggests that one excellent teacher could generate enormous social and economic benefits.

I find these results plausible, though there are some real limitations. The researchers present convincing evidence that their estimates of teacher contributions to student achievement are valid and do not simply reflect differences in student background. But this type of “selection bias” could influence effects on earnings and other long-term outcomes. So, the most intriguing findings here are also still somewhat tenuous. Given the small size of the effects for each individual student, even a slight bit of selection bias could dramatically alter the estimated benefits of an individual teacher.

Perhaps the more important question is, what do the results mean for policy? Policymakers had already concluded that we need to do more to improve teaching. As a result, schools and districts around the country are now experimenting with a wide range of policies to improve teacher performance measures and use these to make high-stakes decisions such as dismissing low-performing teachers.

And here is the rub. The authors, recognizing the interest in dismissing low performers, conduct a simulation of such a policy and emphasize these results in their summary. But it would be a mistake to interpret even these careful simulation results as evidence about actual policies. The effects of actual policies never play out the way simulations suggest, because policies are rarely implemented as intended and the inevitable secondary effects are hard to predict.

There are substantial legal, political, and organizational problems associated with dismissing low performers. For example, in a simple system, many teachers would be fired unjustifiably as a result of imprecision in the performance measures—a lawsuit waiting to happen. High stakes associated with the tests will inevitably distort student scores and the assignment of students to teachers, worsening the measurement problem. A more elaborate evaluation system can address this measurement problem, but such systems are costly, and those costs are not considered here. Such an approach could also change the makeup of the profession, in both positive and negative ways.

There is good reason to think that dismissing more low-performing teachers would improve student outcomes, but the Chetty study is not designed to tell us much about that, or about any of the various policy alternatives. What it does provide is the best evidence yet that teachers matter a great deal and that we should continue looking hard for ways to improve teaching and learning in schools.

Douglas Harris is associate professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Return to “Great Teaching” (Summer 2012)

Over the last decade, research in public education has led us to three conclusions about the teaching profession: teachers are the most important in-school factor in determining student achievement; there is wide variation in teacher effectiveness; and those differences really matter for kids.

These findings should have profound implications for policymakers and practitioners. Now that we have evidence attesting to the enormous contributions of the most effective educators, if we are truly serious about improving student learning and closing the achievement gap, we must think anew about teacher recruitment, placement, evaluation, professional development, retention, and separation.

Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff have helped advance the conversation through their longitudinal study of 2.5 million students over a 20-year span. The correlation between teacher effectiveness (as demonstrated by value-added student growth measures) and student life outcomes (higher salaries, advanced degrees, neighborhoods of residence, and retirement savings) is staggering; it’s not an exaggeration to say that great teachers substantially improve students’ future quality of life and those students’ contributions to the common good. Conversely, traditional education output measures like student course completion, grades, and diplomas have a substantial degree of subjectivity across schools and districts and can potentially provide a misleading account of a student’s college and career readiness.

In New Jersey, we are assessing where our finite resources are best invested. The Chetty study contrasts the opportunity cost of providing retention incentives to effective teachers with that of investments to attract new teachers. Similar cost/benefit questions arise in relation to shaping teacher-placement strategies, developing career ladders, and providing meaningful professional development. To make informed decisions in these areas, we first need to be able to differentiate among our teachers and, ideally, identify strengths to build on and weaknesses to address. That’s why the foundation of our human-capital efforts is a new educator-evaluation framework that’s substantially based on student learning outcomes. If we are able to assess an educator’s effectiveness accurately, we can improve the array of policies and practices that influence our teachers and school leaders. The hallmark of these efforts in our state will not be based on separating ineffective teachers but rather on using evaluation results to target resources toward improving teaching practice.

New Jersey is still in the early innings of this work. Eleven districts, through a pilot initiative, have joined with the state to create the new teacher-evaluation system. This collaboration has helped jump-start this work across the state and shed light on the many significant challenges associated with overhauling the hoary systems in place, such as measuring student achievement in “untested” grades and subjects, ensuring inter-rater agreement and accuracy of teacher practice observations, and ending the long-standing culture of “The Widget Effect.”

The primary takeaway from this critically important research, as the study authors note, is that “finding policies to raise the quality of teaching… is likely to have substantial economic and social benefits in the long run.” We agree with this conclusion, and New Jersey, like other states, must develop such policies over time through a confluence of national and local research, lessons learned from our classrooms, and an unwavering resolve to provide our students with high-quality teachers.

Chris Cerf is acting commissioner of education for the State of New Jersey. Peter Shulman is chief talent officer for the New Jersey Department of Education.

Return to “Great Teaching” (Summer 2012)

The new study by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff  asks whether high-value-added teachers (i.e., teachers who raise student test scores) also have positive longer-term impacts on students, as reflected in college attendance, earnings, avoiding teenage pregnancy, and the quality of the neighborhood in which they reside as adults. As a step on the way, the researchers investigate whether such teachers have been properly identified, that is, are the teachers who are producing larger achievement gains from year to year, according to value-added models, actually responsible for those gains? The paper contains valuable evidence indicating that the answer is yes. First, the authors obtain data on family background from federal tax returns not normally available to researchers. This allows them to measure family characteristics (such as parental income) not typically controlled for when teacher value-added is estimated. If introducing such factors reduces the explanatory power of teacher value-added, it is an indication that the value-added estimate was inflated, and that part of what had been attributed to the teacher was in fact due to favorable family circumstances. The study authors find that including such controls does not detract from the explanatory power of estimated value-added.

The authors also investigate whether high-value-added teachers have benefited by being assigned students who would have made greater gains on standardized tests for unobserved reasons (such as family factors that cannot be gleaned even from tax returns). This is normally difficult to do, given the possible influences on the way students are assigned to teachers. The report succeeds by focusing on average test gains in grades within schools where mean value-added within a grade has been affected by the movement of teachers in and out of the grade. What matters for this analysis is not which student was assigned to which teacher within the grade, but how the movement of teachers has altered the quality of teaching in that grade as a whole. It turns out that subsequent gains within these grades are close to those what would be expected from the change in mean teacher value-added. Provided the movement of teachers in and out of a grade has not changed the makeup of students enrolled in that grade, this finding supports the conclusion that measured value-added of teachers is an unbiased predictor of future test-score gains, as there appears to be no other explanation for the resulting improvement in test scores.

When the authors examine the association between teacher value-added and outcomes in young adulthood, however, for the most part they do not undertake the same tests to ensure that these associations are not artifacts of the way students are sorted among teachers. They do not introduce controls from tax returns to see whether the explanatory power of teacher value-added for later earnings, college attendance, and other factors, falls. Nor, with the exception of college attendance, do they test for the influence of unobservable factors in the manner just described.

The omission of such tests undercuts their claim to have demonstrated that high-value-added teachers contribute to better long-term outcomes. Without the same rigorous tests, we cannot be sure that the observed association between teacher value-added and long-term outcomes was not the result of other factors (for example, efforts made by parents with the strongest parenting skills to ensure their children were assigned to the most effective instructors). It is not enough to show that omitted family characteristics have not been confounded with value-added as a predictor of future test-score gains. The factors that shape test performance are not necessarily those that influence future earnings or the avoidance of a teenage pregnancy. Character education and the values parents impart to their offspring are likely to matter for the latter in ways that they do not for cognitive functioning.

In short, the authors provide a persuasive answer to the question: does a high-value-added teacher actually raise subsequent test scores? They have not so far provided equally persuasive evidence answering the question: does a high-value-added teacher improve subsequent life outcomes?

Dale Ballou is associate professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University and associate director of the National Center on Performance Incentives.

Return to “Great Teaching” (Summer 2012)

The movie Waiting for Superman chronicles the role of chance in determining the fate of a relatively small number of families trying to enroll their children in oversubscribed charter schools. Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff document the much larger problem of ineffective teachers scattered about a multitude of schools. From the viewpoint of the student, this latter issue may appear to be chance when class assignments are made, and when some get good teachers and others get ineffective ones. From the standpoint of the system, however, it is not chance but mismanagement that allows ineffective teachers to continue harming students.

Chetty et al. have produced new and elegant estimates of how teacher effectiveness relates to long-run student outcomes. As economists are prone to do, they have produced a paper that deals with a long list of technical questions that have absorbed the scientific literature on teacher effectiveness. Their work is thorough, convincing, and scientifically innovative.

The overarching idea of the paper is linking gains from having a high-value-added teacher in grades 4–8 to subsequent long-run outcomes, including college attendance, earnings, and family creation. But, from the outset, they must deal with the two primary challenges leveled at teacher value-added measures based on student test scores. First, are these  estimates biased measures of effectiveness? The answer is no. The wealth of information that Chetty et al. have about families from tax records and some clever analyses effectively rule out the possibility that conventional estimates of value-added based only on school administrative data are misleading. Second, do the effects of good teachers (or bad teachers) quickly fade away? Again, the answer is no. Even as these students leave school and enter into adult careers in their late 20s, the significant trace of their early schooling is quite discernible.

But the warranted attention to this work derives not from its technical aspects but from the policy implications of the results. The fundamental finding is that good teachers have an extraordinarily powerful impact on the future lives of their students. Symmetrically, the researchers show the lasting damage that poor teachers have on the lives of their students. This work sweeps away a variety of attempts to deflect questions about the importance of teacher quality and our ability to identify it. It also brings us back to the question of informed policy.

As the evidence on the importance of teacher quality has grown, policy discussions have actually moved. In the beginning, there were doubts about the impact of teacher quality relative to families, curriculum, or a host of other influences. Those doubts have largely receded and been replaced by questions of how policy should proceed. And here is where the additional evidence presented in the Chetty study comes into play.

Much of the discussion has centered on the political difficulties of reforming the schools by dealing with the problem of the most ineffective teachers. The unions have dug in their heels, resisting any change that does not ensure perfect identification of the worst teachers. Their resistance has resulted in many policymakers simply asserting that it is too politically costly to make active decisions about teacher effectiveness and instead looking to alternatives such as more professional development, better mentoring, or heightened requirements of certification.

Chetty et al.’s evidence shows that bad teachers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income and productivity each year that they remain in the classroom. These costs are large enough that failing to address them is simply inexcusable. It is time that we develop policies that truly are designed to help our children and not just the adults in schools today.

We have recently seen a number of brave states step out and legislate better evaluations of teachers including, when possible, the use of value-added measures. Coupled with both pay and tenure reforms, these movements show real promise and should be encouraged on a wider scale.

Eric A. Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Return to “Great Teaching” (Summer 2012)

On the whole, his piece is lightweight, trying to make a Santa Cruz mountain out of facts known to the ground squirrels swarming the university’s foothills.  (When at the Hoover Institution, located on the Stanford camps, those hills and squirrels are among my favorite companions.)

Auletta worries that Hennessy is too assiduous at harvesting the wealth of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Is science and engineering taking over?  Are the liberal arts about to be abandoned?  Are Stanford students too happy?  Where are the demonstrators? As if those are today’s raging issues in higher education!

Auletta rightly questions Hennessey’s effort to build a new, science-oriented campus in New York, but he then turns around and attacks the president for retracting the proposal when doubled crossed by the New York politicians. The idea of a second campus on the East Coast was always a distraction. It poured a hefty share of Stanford’s wealth into bricks-and-mortar thousands of miles from home. Why not take that same pot of gold—or, more exactly, a handful or two out of that pot—and start building a digital university for the ages?

Apparently, that much better idea is now on the agenda. After Hennessy’s New York real estate deal fell through, Hennessey, always better at thinking outside the box than most of his peers, seems to have come to the realization that digital learning could disrupt even the nation’s greatest universities. Stanford is already offering an online high school diploma to any young person the school admits no matter where they live.  That it is placing tight limits on enrollment only makes sense until its model is fully designed and tested.  But once affluent families begin comparing the strength and quality of a Stanford diploma with those offered by many local high schools, there could be a vast demand for its product.

And it may not be just high school that Stanford could reshape.  Auletta tells us that Hennessy’s “experience in Silicon Valley proves that digital disruption is normal, and even desirable…. Students in an online university could take any course whenever they wanted, and wouldn’t have to waste time bicycling to class.”  Apparently, Stanford’s president is mulling all this over during his sabbatical.

Like a good adventure story, Auletta’s tale gets better and better as it goes along and reads best of all at the very end.

- Paul E. Peterson

Unemployment insurance is supposed to help those unfortunate workers who lose their jobs as the result of an economic contraction or their own company’s need to regroup.  But those who work for the public schools, institutions that only seldom need to retrench and that hardly ever close their doors, have nonetheless found a way to convenient way to collect unemployment benefits.

As those who have followed the school battles in Wisconsin and Indiana know well, school employees enjoy generously funded health-care benefits and handsome defined benefit pension plans that are driving many state and local governments to the edge of bankruptcy.  Now, add still another give-away to the public employees of the nation’s schools—unemployment benefits for those weeks when kids are given their spring break.

I learned all this simply because the number of people seeking unemployment benefits went up last week, which may signal that the U. S. economy is at risk of falling back into another recession.

But, says the Wall Street Journal’s “Marketwatch” (April 19), we can’t be sure these numbers tell us much about the direction of the economy. “The weekly claims data is often hard to decipher in April because of the Easter holiday and spring break,” it reports, “when many school workers such as bus drivers and cafeteria workers are eligible to receive temporary benefits.”

I leave it to you, dear readers, to tell me just how bus drivers and cafeteria workers pull off this scam.  I had always thought the wages and salaries paid to public employees take into account school vacation times as well as the days they are on the job.  I thought the unemployed had to prove they had been fired from their job to get those marvelous (to coin a phrase) unemployment benefits.  How did bus drivers get access to those unemployment funds during holiday week?  Does this also happen in late December?  How about summer time? Who else gets them?

I’ve also heard the rumor that teachers are delighted when they get the spring pink slip in those years when the state legislature has yet to vote state aid for the schools the following fall.   Everyone knows that the legislature will eventually pony up the dollars, but school districts hand out pink slips to teachers anyhow, telling them they are fired, at least for now, because no one knows when the state dollars will flow.

Although sob stories about frightened teachers appear in the local paper, the truth, I’ve been told, is that the slip gives them the right to collect unemployment benefits even if they use the money to take a European tour prior to returning to school in the fall.

That’s the rumor I once heard.  Tell me it’s not so.  Tell me the wages and salaries and benefits that school employees officially receive are all that they get.

- Paul E. Peterson

Make no mistake: The “new normal” of tougher budget times—as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan calls it—is here to stay for American K-12 education.

Tight budgets should encourage districts to spend smartly and stretch funds, rather than harm education with shortsighted cuts. Photo by blognd

While that presents plenty of hardships, it also offers local officials a golden opportunity to rethink the way we run schools and to boost productivity and efficiency, a point I make in my new policy brief, “How School Districts Can Stretch the School Dollar.”

How?

Let’s start with a few key principles to keep in mind when weighing cuts:

Solving our budget crisis shouldn’t come at the expense of children. We should do everything we can to protect students’ learning opportunities and boost their achievement.

Nor can it come from teachers’ sacrifice alone. Suppressing teacher salaries forever isn’t a recipe for recruiting bright young people into education—or retaining the excellent teachers we have now.

Quick fixes aren’t a good answer; we need fundamental changes that enhance productivity. The reforms—and investments—with the greatest payoff are those that will maximize student outcomes at lower cost. And since education is overwhelmingly a people business—and most of the system’s costs are in personnel—the most promising reforms are those that rethink our staffing model.

So how can school districts dramatically increase productivity and stretch the school dollar?

Aim for a leaner, more productive, better paid workforce.

In a people business like education, it’s next to impossible to cut costs without letting some people go. But the answer isn’t just to lay off teachers and let class sizes rise (though, in most grades and subjects, modest increases aren’t the end of the world). In the last two decades, school systems have hired all manner of instructional coaches, teachers’ aides, program administrators, support staff, counselors, psychiatrists, specialists, and so forth. Redefining these roles—and those of classroom teachers—provides great opportunities for increased productivity. None of this is easy, but districts should consider:

• Asking classroom teachers to take on additional responsibility in return for greater pay. Can they do without aides? Handle larger classes (or student loads)? Take on mentoring roles along with classroom instruction? Where these additional responsibilities enable the system to operate with fewer staff (even if that means the remaining staff work a longer year), the system can justify higher pay while still realizing savings.
• Eliminating some ancillary positions. Can districts manage with fewer specialists, instructional coaches, teachers’ aides, support staff, and the like? If classroom teachers can take on some of these jobs, not only will this save on salaries (some of which could be reallocated to bonuses or salary enhancements for teachers), it will save dramatically on benefits.
• Redesigning their approach to special education. Many of the specialists that districts have hired in recent decades serve special populations—mostly students with disabilities but also English language learners. Districts should consider whether their approaches to educating these high-need students are as cost-effective as they could be. (That doesn’t mean cheap—it means effective, at a reasonable cost.) For example, if a district uses a “co-teaching” model with regular teacher and a special education teacher in the same classroom—which is hugely expensive—could it try a pull-out approach instead? Or if the best model has these students staying in the classroom, could the extra services be provided over the summer, or after school?  

Pay for productivity. The best way to increase productivity is to ask fewer people to do more work in order to get better results. And they should be compensated fairly for it. Here’s how:

• A more aggressive salary schedule. Teachers improve dramatically in their first few years on the job, and their salaries should rise dramatically along with their effectiveness—reaching the maximum base salary much sooner than is now the case. This would help with retention of young teachers—a huge opportunity for saving money (on training, recruitment, etc.)—and with raising student achievement, while eliminating the spiked pay at the end of a career that drives up pension obligations.






To learn more, download the full policy brief, How Districts Can Stretch the School Dollar.

• Prioritize salaries over benefits. It’s no secret: School districts have to get their health care costs under control. Every dollar going into health insurance is a dollar that can’t go into higher salaries. Plans should be redesigned so that employees have more skin in the game—and incentives to keep their own healthcare costs down. Co-pays, employee premiums, out-of-network fees, and the rest should be brought into line with what workers in the private sector expect.

Integrate technology thoughtfully. Online and “blended” school models—where students spend all or part of the day learning online—are coming to K-12 education. These can be catalysts for greater pupil engagement, individualization, and achievement. If organized right, they can also be opportunities for cost-cutting. Why couldn’t students learn foreign languages via Rosetta Stone, for example, instead of in a traditional classroom?

Rather than hope for revenue increases that are unlikely to materialize, smart leaders can turn the present budget crisis into an opportunity. Most of the school dollar goes toward instructional staff and the people who manage them. Rethinking whom we hire, what they do, how we pay them, and how to incorporate technology—that’s where the big payoff is. Local officials need to reconsider the core business of schooling—and get key stakeholders to buy into a new, more cost-effective, more productive vision. That’s no small thing. Are they up to the challenge?

-Michael Petrilli

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper Blog

We are informed that  “when possible, people simply prefer to do this in person with a live human being standing in front of them.”

Yglesias concludes that “affluent American parents will continue to foot the bill for their kids to get schooled in person” rather than making use of online learning.

His analysis would be totally persuasive were it not for the fact that  97 percent of all people who do yoga do their exercises at home, either with or without yoga videos.  When possible, people stretch and bend and twist at home, because they do not like other folks staring at them when they are contorting their bodies in a variety of embarrassing ways, especially when their yoga skills are under-developed.  A tiny percentage—no more than 3 percent—prefer to have someone coaxing them along or like to snigger at their less proficient classmates.

From these facts it can be concluded that Americans—both affluent and otherwise—will be insisting that their children take their high school classes online so that they are not bullied or embarrassed in the classroom when they are not as skilled as others.

You may wonder where I got my data. I picked it up from the same place Yglesias got his info—the distant corners of nowhere.

-Paul E. Peterson

I will not pretend to be an expert on teaching, but as a school board member I confess to deep and continuous agita over the system’s inability to do the right thing; rather, its amazing ability to deny reality, which is the prime directive for institutional entropy. (It is not just the reality of good research that is ignored, it’s the reality of crumbling schools and generations of untaught children.) I had a veteran teacher pull me aside one day and almost shout, “They keep giving new names to the same tired and unworkable ideas. Why don’t they just let me teach!”

Since reading E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, celebrating its 25th year in print, I have watched American educators do somersaults to avoid the obvious need for rigorous, fact-based curricula. In fact, the two denials—the effectiveness of direct instruction and the value of content knowledge—go hand in hand and together probably account for most of the national educational malaise. You name it—Clark et al say it goes under various names, “including discovery learning, problem-based learning, inquiry learning, experiential learning, and constructivist learning”—our educators are locked on to bad ideas and ineffective pedagogies like cruise missiles to their preprogrammed targets. “Each new set of advocates for unguided approaches seemed unaware of, or uninterested in,” write Clark et al, “previous evidence that unguided approaches had not been validated.”

As my friend Barry Garelick writes about the new Brookings report on the effectiveness of instructional materials:

The report makes this common sense observation and recommendation: “There is strong evidence that the choice of instructional materials has large effects on student learning-effects that rival in size those that are associated with differences in teacher effectiveness. But whereas improving teacher quality through changes in the preparation and professional development of teachers and the human resources policies surrounding their employment is challenging, expensive, and time-consuming, making better choices among available instructional materials should be relatively easy, inexpensive, and quick.”

That makes so much sense that it will either be ignored, or the snake oil purveyors who sell Investigations, EM, CMP and the like will claim “We agree! And our products do just that!”

One need not be that cynical about the situation, but willful ignorance is a phrase that often comes to mind when watching such “common sense” prescriptions for change go unheeded. Obviously, those who have been schooled in such notions as discovery learning and are getting paid for using it have little incentive to read the research, much less tell their colleagues about it. And, by the same token, there is no incentive for school boards to change when the money keeps rolling. My colleagues on my school board are education preservers not reformers. Even though their acts serve to reinforce failure, their first instinct is to dig in, to resist change. Why? Well, why not? Over lunch the other day, a board colleague ticked off her list of ideas for creating a good school, including creating a “culture of high expectations.” When I asked, how you go about doing that, she was stumped; rather, she didn’t like the answer, which was to hold teachers and administrators accountable for student performance. She preferred, “It’s the parents.” And so it goes.

Even when angry citizens come to the board, as several did a few weeks ago, their complaints seem to fall on deaf ears.

“We hear all the time, `Don’t rock the boat,’” said one of those complaining parents. “But I can tell you, we are strapped in, and the boat has turned over.” The problem: the kids are drowning, but not the educators.

Complacency is how Hirsch, who tends to see the problem as “bad ideas” rather than “bad people,” explained the problem in an essay two years ago in the New York Review of Books:

The root cause of [the public education] decline, starting in the 1960s, was a by-then-decades-old complacency on the part of school leaders and in the nation at large. By the early twentieth century worries about the stability of the Republic had subsided, and by the 1930s, under the enduring influence of European Romanticism, educational leaders had begun to convert the community-centered school of the nineteenth century to the child- centered school of the twentieth-a process that was complete by 1950. The chief tenet of the child-centered school was that no bookish curriculum was to be set out in advance. Rather, learning was to arise naturally out of activities, projects, and daily experience.

Paying little attention to the results of the “anti-bookish, child-centered viewpoint,” as Hirsch writes, the nation slept while it experienced “a steep decline in twelfth-grade academic achievement between 1962 and 1980, after which, despite vigorous reform efforts, reading and math scores on the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress have hardly changed.”

And now, as Hirsch warns, we are trying to yoke the child-centered anti-intellectualism to our new testing and accountability fetish. “This contradictory and self-defeating situation,” says Hirsch, has lead to even worse practices:

…drills in how-to skills that will prepare [students] to pass tests. Many of the weekly hours that are assigned to language arts in the early grades are now being devoted to practicing reading strategies such as `questioning the author’ and `finding the main idea.’ [Diane] Ravitch describes in detail a highly touted reform in New York City and San Diego called `balanced literacy,’ which requires students to spend a lot of time practicing such reading strategies but does not prescribe any particular books, poems, and essays to practice them on.

The good news is that we have two trends that are gaining ground on the monster that is our education system:  a renewed appreciation for content (and that is not, as some would have it, a sudden love of “nonfiction”) and the new market mechanisms (i.e. choice) that incentivize innovation and renewal. If we can keep our eyes on the prize of the former, we will sort out the problems of dumbed-down instructional materials and vapid instructional techniques.

As for the latter, David Brooks set out our choices nicely the other day in an essay about our “two economies.”   One economy is that of the free market, which Brooks says has a “creative dynamism” that is both “astounding and a little terrifying. Over the past five years, amid turmoil and uncertainty, American businesses have shed employees, becoming more efficient and more productive. According to The Wall Street Journal on Monday, the revenue per employee at S.&P. 500 companies increased from $378,000 in 2007 to $420,000 in 2011.”

Public education, for the most part, still lives in the second economy: “a large sector… that does not face… global competition.” Its leaders do “try to improve productivity and use new technologies, but they are not compelled by do-or-die pressure, and their pace of change is slower.” Why?  Because there are no widespread threatened layoffs. No guillotine focusing the mind.

Brooks understands the “conflicts between those who live in Economy I and those who live in Economy II” and how “choice-oriented education reforms” might terrify those clinging to their monopoly guarantees as they face the prospect of an education sector “as dynamic, creative and efficient as Economy I.”

Though most of the public education sector still does not see the “urgent need to understand the interplay between the two different sectors,” there are signs that even in education, increasing numbers of leaders of Economy II are finding ways to make our schools not only responsive to good ideas but to the educational needs of their children. And they are not afraid to light fires of accountability—no more teacher tenure, more value-added evaluations—that mimic the incentives that characterize Economy I. Once parents are untethered from the overturned boat, those not wanting to rock it, like my board colleagues, will understand that they better stop worrying about the weather and start doing what’s needed to stay afloat. Shouted the coxswain: Row!

-Peter Meyer

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View blog.

Greene derides our goal of identifying “best practices,” that is, the policies and practices that have enabled the students in an increasing number of countries to surpass student achievement in the United States.  He seems to suggest that is a fool’s errand, undertaken only by industry gurus like Tom Peters and Jim Collins in the business community.  It is obvious to him that this is a form of “quackery.”  The evidence he offers is that some of the firms that Peters and Collins identified as top performers subsequently failed.

Firms rise and fall.  Only a handful of the firms in the Dow Jones Industrial Average fifty years ago are in it today, and many don’t exist any more.  But that hardly means they were not once great or that firms today have nothing to learn from other firms that are eating their lunch now in the same market they serve.

Quite the contrary.  When the Japanese attacked American manufacturers in the late 1970s, many American firms went out of business in the face of superior manufacturing methods.  Most of those that survived did so, in part, because they took their challengers seriously and studied their methods in detail.  They studied their “best practices.”  They did it with industrial benchmarking, the method we have used.  I would like Jay Greene to explain to all of us why this method, which proved so successful in helping to restore American manufacturing to its leading position in the 1980s, should be derided when it comes to restoring American education to its former world-leading status.

In our book, we point out that the research methods, most valued by American researchers, which involve the random assignment of research subjects to “treatments,” cannot be used when researching entire national education systems, because it is not possible to randomly assign national populations to the national education systems of other countries.  Oh yes they can, says Greene, and he points to the work of Karthik Muralidharan and Michael Kremer.  Well, we engaged Muralidharan to accompany us on our three-week-long benchmarking research in India and I know his work well.  He is best known for his own research in that country, in which he looks at the widespread implementation of a program to provide a form of private schools to the children of impoverished rural farmers.  It turns out that these schools are more effective than the public schools they replace, partly because the teachers in the public schools rarely show up for work and partly because more teachers can be purchased for the same amount of money.  Interesting, but irrelevant to the argument at hand.  No one in his right mind would characterize this program as an entire national education system.  Not for the first time, Greene grossly mischaracterized the evidence in order to make his point.

Greene not only attacks the methods used in the chapters in each country in our book, but he then goes on to announce that the conclusions drawn in the last chapter have almost nothing to do with the preceding chapters.  He offers two pieces of evidence for this outrageous assertion.

One is  Kai-ming Cheng’s observation in his chapter on the Shanghai system in which he describes how a certain number of slots in key schools in Shanghai are set aside for students from outside that schools’ enrollment area who can choose that school if they wish.  But I learned from our own benchmarking in Shanghai that those slots are sold to parents and the poorer their children’s performance in their sending school, the more the receiving school charges.  This system was not designed to facilitate school choice nor was it designed to improve student performance.  It was designed to enable formerly elite schools serving members of the Communist Party to stay afloat as they are decommissioned as key elite schools.  That is why I did not include it in my list of strategies in wide use in countries that are outperforming the United States.

The other piece of evidence that Greene offers for his assertion that my analysis and summary ignored the work of the chapter authors in the book is that I ignored what they had to say about decentralization of decision-making in these systems.  But that is not true.  What I describe is a process that many others have observed.  The top-performing countries have centralized the setting of goals, the setting of standards and the measurement of student achievement, and relaxed their control over the way schools choose to get their students to high standards.  Over time, as they have succeeded in raising the quality of their teaching forces, they have started to relax the degree to which they specify their standards and curriculum, moving from a bureaucratic form of accountability to a more professional form of accountability.  This whole process cannot be accurately described as a process of either centralization or decentralization.  It is much more accurately described as a process of professionalizing the teaching force, a point that is made repeatedly in Surpassing Shanghai.

If Greene was right, and I ignored the chapter authors’ presentation of the facts when writing my analysis and summary, you could reasonably expect that they would be, to say the least, annoyed.  But, in fact, I did what any editor and summarizer could be expected to do: I shared my draft analysis and summary of the chapters with my fellow chapter authors, who seemed, on the whole, quite satisfied that I captured the essence of their findings.

After denouncing the “best practices” identified by the authors of Surpassing Shanghai on the basis of the methods we used, Greene appears to realize that his war on “best practices” has led him to inadvertently attack the kinds of studies done by people whose policy prescriptions he prefers, like Ludger Woessmann and Eric Hanushek, who have done well-regarded statistical analyses of survey data from OECD-PISA and other sources.  We have, by the way, a high regard for these researchers and relied on them in our own work.  So he retreats from his blanket condemnation of “best practices” study methods to exempt quantitative studies.  But, then, to my astonishment, he even announces that case studies are OK if they are “well-constructed.”  This is after directing what he takes to be withering fire at our case studies.  He mentions in particular Charles Glenn’s case studies, describing them as “well constructed,” but never explains what distinguishes “well-constructed” case studies from ours, which—apparently—are not.

So, in the end, all the methods we used meet with Jay Greene’s approval.  It is only our conclusions that are odious.  He is left with a very weak reed indeed to which he then clutches.  The problem with the best practices approach, he says at the end of his review, is that, “by avoiding variation in the dependent variable,” it prevents any scientific identification of causation.  What?  Our aim was to look at the top-performing countries to find out how they are doing it.  If we strip the highfalutin language from Greene’s assertion, he is saying that we cannot possibly figure out what is causing their top performance, because all or most of the factors we think might be causing it might be found in low-performing countries, too, and, if we haven’t looked at them, we have no way of knowing that.

But Jay Greene evidently did not read the introductory chapter of our book, in which we lay out our method, or the concluding chapters, in which we conduct the analysis promised in the first chapter.  The strategy we used was to compare the top performing countries to the United States.  What we found was that the top-performing countries, as different from one another as Finland and Shanghai, Canada and Japan, shared a set of principles that underlie their reform strategies with each other, but not with the United States, and the United States is pursuing a set of strategies bases on principles that are not found in the countries that are doing the best job of education their students.  Greene, you will note, failed to tell his readers that.

Why?  It is not because he does not like our methods.  His colleagues are using the same methods.  It is not because there is “no variation in our dependent variable.”  There is variation in our dependent variable; we are comparing countries in which student achievement (the dependent variable) is high, to one, the United States, in which it is mediocre.

It is because he does not like our results.  We found that the principles of school reform he has been advocating don’t work.  They are not being used in the countries with the top performance, and the country that has been most influenced by his message turns out to be a mediocre performer.  That is a very important finding.  And it is apparently a little difficult to take.

-Marc Tucker

Marc  Tucker is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Center on Education and the Economy.

NB: Jay Greene has responded to this response here.

The fundamental problem is that “best practices” analyses lack variation in the dependent variable – they only examine in detail successful organizations or countries – so they can’t link particular practices or policies to success.  To make such a link they would need to observe that the presence or absence of those practices or policies is related to the presence or absence of success.  If they only look at successful organizations, then they can’t know whether they would have been less (or more) successful had they not adopted a particular policy or practice.  They also do not rule out the possibility that others who have adopted the “best practices” do so without success.

But Tucker claims that he didn’t only look at successful countries because “the strategy we used was to compare the top performing countries to the United States.”  Making (mostly implicit) comparisons to the United States does not solve the problem.  Again, without considering a broad spectrum of successful and unsuccessful countries it is impossible to attribute the superior performance of another country to any particular policy or practice.

There are many things that are different between the U.S. and Shanghai, Finland, Japan, Singapore, and Canada.  How can Tucker or anyone know which differences caused the superior performance?  Tucker just picks and chooses the policies and practices he favors, ignoring that his recommendations are not even universally present in the handful of successful places he examines.  And by limiting variation in the dependent variable to exclude places that perform worse than the United States, Tucker is unable to discover whether lower-achieving countries are also employing the practices and policies he recommends, which would debunk his claim of having found the formula for success.

I’m far from being the only one who is aware of the problems with Tucker’s method of “selection on the dependent variable.”  Virtually every introductory text on research design warns readers not to do as Tucker and other best practices enthusiasts do when they focus only on successful organizations or countries.  For example, Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba, in their classic Designing Social Inquiry, make the point emphatically:

That brings us to a basic and obvious rule: selection should allow for the possibility of at least some variation on the dependent variable. This point seems so obvious that we would think it hardly needs to be mentioned. How can we explain variations on a dependent variable if it does not vary? Unfortunately, the literature is full of work that makes just this mistake of failing to let the dependent variable vary…. The cases of extreme selection bias—where there is by design no variation on the dependent variable—are easy to deal with: avoid them! We will not learn about causal effects from them.

In my review I recommend analyses of international policies and practices done by Eric Hanushek, Ludger Woessmann, Martin West, Michael Kremer, Karthik Muralidharan and Charles Glenn because, unlike Tucker and other “best practices” gurus,  they avoid the error of selection on the dependent variable by considering the full range of outcomes, not just focusing on successful places.

Tucker is apparently unable to understand the difference between what he and these reputable researchers do when he mistakenly declares:

Greene appears to realize that his war on “best practices” has led him to inadvertently attack the kinds of studies done by people whose policy prescriptions he prefers, like Ludger Woessmann and Eric Hanushek, who have done well-regarded statistical analyses of survey data from OECD-PISA and other sources…. So, in the end, all the methods we used meet with Jay Greene’s approval.  It is only our conclusions that are odious.

Tucker’s inability to understand the difference and his dismissal of the selection on dependent variable criticism as “highfalutin language” is just plain embarrassing.  It’s not so much embarrassing for him, since he appears to be proud in his ignorance, as it is embarrassing for the Gates Foundation that pays for his work and the supporters of Common Core who rely on Tucker as one of their principal architects and advocates.

There is a cynical habit in the education policy world to fund and promote analyses that people know or should know to be faulty as long as those analyses advance their cause.  Shaming those who engage in this cynical practice by revealing the obvious flaws in Tucker’s work was the purpose of my review.  I fear that it will not end the use of “best practices” in education, but I hope it will exact a price for those who engage in such hucksterism.

-Jay Greene

Most other distinctions are grayer today, involving degrees of difference about things like teacher evaluations, “common core” standards, and just how much discretion Washington should return to states.

Short of plain goofiness (as in “abolish the Department of Education”), vouchers are where bright lines get drawn. The conventional explanation is that Democrats don’t dare cross this threshold lest the teacher unions (already antsy about charters, merit pay, test-based accountability, etc.) forsake their traditional party—or simply sit on their hands come campaign season and election day, while Republicans tend to take the side of parents and don’t much care what the unions—or other parts of the education establishment—think or do.

It feels and acts like a political line—witness the political football known as the D.C. voucher program—yet not so many years ago this was primarily a split over platform language, and party positioning because vouchers were all but nonexistent. (For ages, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and a few wee towns in northern New England were the only places you could actually find any.)

That’s changed—and continues to. A few weeks back, one could already point to Indiana and Ohio, both with statewide programs. The D.C. program is back, at least for now. Louisiana moved the other day. And then there are kissing-cousin programs like tax credit scholarships in Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, and beyond.

Vouchers and their cousins are real today, thanks partly to political realignments, partly to the Zelman decision (which took the Establishment Clause issue off the table as far as the feds are concerned), and partly to mounting dismay over the performance of public schools, as well as the meager returns from other education reforms of the past two decades.

As vouchers have become real, however, the political picture has grown more complex. Eight newish factors are worth noting:

First, while the U.S. constitution is no longer a deal-breaker, some thirty-eight states have sundry provisions in their own constitutions that make it difficult or impossible to aid private schools and/or religious institutions and/or any sort of education program that isn’t “free and uniform.” (This is what killed the Florida “opportunity scholarship program” in that state’s Supreme Court in 2006.) Hence there’s a practical limit to how far vouchers can really spread.

Second, as religion has loomed larger as a political issue, evangelicals (most often Republicans) are keener and keener for it to play a role in public policy, including religious education and church-affiliated schools, while secularists (more apt to be Democrats) are even more resistant to public support for such schools.

Third, other features of private schools—that have nothing to do with unions—also cause palpitations among liberals (most often Democrats), such as selectivity in the admissions office (and the risk of “exclusion” of poor or disabled or minority or other “diverse” kids). Such anxieties may not cause them to keep their own daughters and sons out of such schools but a double standard often comes into play where “public policy” is concerned.

Fourth, even as the pro-voucher team has picked up a handful (but only that) of influential Democrats, a lot of state and local Republicans have grown somewhat equivocal about school choice—charters, vouchers, inter-district transfers, and more. Their own suburban constituents, whether enrolled in public or private schools, are averse to welcoming many of those kids into their classrooms, and their proud suburban school systems don’t much want to lose their own pupils, either.

Fifth, what was for decades the strongest lobby in favor of vouchers (and tuition tax credits and more), namely the Roman Catholic Church, is today neither nearly as strong as it once was nor nearly as committed to revitalizing its own schools. It seems to have lost most of the wind from its sails.

Sixth, private schools in general are queasy about government entanglements and rules, worried about “accountability” requirements, alarmed at the prospect of forfeiting their distinctiveness, fretful about losing control of their standards and admission processes, leery of disclosing comparable data on their own educational effectiveness, and, sometimes, legitimately unsure that they really can do a good job with those kids. Nor has American private education shown much entrepreneurial inclination to grow to accommodate greater demand.

Seventh, with state and local budgets tight, the claim that vouchers save taxpayer money over the long run is met with incredulity by school systems that can only see revenue disappearing along with headcount. And the argument that vouchers will be a needless and, for the taxpayer, costly windfall for middle-class families whose children already attend private schools is not easy to refute. (Of course, a carefully designed program may aid only “new” students.)

Eighth, and finally, the word “private” has grown even more suspect in American education circles today than it was yesterday. “Privatization” has sometimes gone badly. Some private operators of charter schools are greedy, self-absorbed, and uninterested in educational quality. (Likewise for private SES providers and such.) Early evaluations have yielded mixed results for privately operated “cyber schools.” Private school (and college) tuitions keep rising without evidence of improved results. And in era of transparency and accountability, the reluctance of private educational institutions to disclose key information about themselves, their students, their academic gains, and their finances—even to private organizations such as GreatSchools.net—has made them at least slightly suspect. (Why are they so secretive?)

I’m still heartily in favor of more vouchers, provided that the program is structured with an eye toward serving the neediest kids first and making participating schools reasonably accountable for their results. I do expect the momentum in this direction to continue. But I don’t expect it to accelerate. And that’s not just because of hostility from Messrs. Obama and Duncan.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry originally appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

The program took effect only in July 2011, and the Utah legislature is still tinkering with the specifics of the law, so it is too soon to draw firm conclusions.  However, early signs indicate that choices between online and brick-and-mortar courses will be limited to offerings within the student’s home school district.  Statewide competition may well be more the exception than the rule.

The program is designed to grow at a measured pace.  In the current school year, students may take 2 of their 8 credits online, with that number increasing by one each year until, in 2016-17, students may take three-fourths of their coursework online.  Such measured step-taking is not to be faulted, as it takes time to develop high-quality content and to put systems in place.  Still, it will be at least 5 years before the full impact of the Utah initiative can be assessed.

Keep in mind that digital learning is still but a speck on the public school horizon.  As of October 2011, nearly 550,000 pupils were enrolled in public schools in Utah.  But only one percent of that number–less than 6,000 students—has received credit for courses taken from the state-run Utah Electronic High School.  A harbinger of what may happen under the new program, course-taking at Electronic High has been hampered by state rules. To be eligible, students must be homeschoolers or seeking credit recovery (for courses which they failed or from which they withdrew)—unless guidance counselors at their home schools agree to include online courses in their education plan.

In principle, the new law opens the door to many more statewide providers in addition to Electronic High.  But in the first year of its operation, fewer than 200 students were enrolled in an online course offered by a provider outside their home districts.  Applications from close to one hundred additional students were rejected, mainly on the grounds that the online course had already begun or the student was trying to speed up their high school graduation by adding courses to the eight regarded as full-time load.

While any high school student is eligible to take two courses online, students enrolled in online courses may not earn more credits than those earned by students who take a full course load at a district school—unless they plan to graduate early according to their plan of study, which must be approved by the student’s guidance counselor. That is an unduly restrictive rule.  One of the most promising features of online education is that it can allow students to move forward at their own pace, not in lock-step with all the other students.  By expecting courses to start at the beginning of the school year, and by not allowing students to enroll in extra courses, Utah has placed an unnecessary barrier on the innovation. And by making district-paid guidance counselors the gatekeepers to digital education, the state has set up a barrier to student choice, even though the law says that guidance counselors cannot restrict the student’s selection of online courses.

Funding levels also seem to be designed more for the purpose of protecting school district revenues than encouraging the creation of exciting courses. Per pupil funding at Utah district schools is hardly generous—just short of $8,000 a year (as compared to a national average that runs close to $12,000 annually).  State funding for students attending charter schools is just 70 percent of the district level—less than $5700 per pupil annually. Online courses have been funded at about the charter school level—$726 per full-year course or $363 per term.  But if an amendment recently passed by the state legislature is signed into law by the governor, only language arts, math and science courses will be funded close to this level (at $350 per term).

Lighter-weight courses—health, fitness for life, computer literacy, financial literacy, and driver’s education—will be funded at $200 per term. That would be reasonable if academic courses were funded at a higher rate and the same rule were applied to brick-and-mortar schools.   But when funding for lightweight digital courses is tightened to the extreme, it removes the ballast that digital providers need to mount the poorly funded heavyweight courses. The point is non-trivial, as lightweight courses are among the most popular online options. Many students see little point in wasting their time in classrooms, day after day, just to learn how to balance their checkbook or take care of their acne.  The highly regarded Florida Virtual School relies on the revenue from such courses to provide expensive, high-quality academic courses. That option is being taken off the table in Utah.

It is nice that districts will receive about 25 percent of the revenue for courses that are being offered online instead of at their schools, as they have fixed costs that are ongoing regardless of whether a student takes 6 or 8 courses from them.  And one understands that states, strapped for cash, must search for ways to save their dollars.  But starving the digital baby is hardly the way to motivate the design of high-quality courses.

The demand for online learning is surely higher than indicated by the fact that only 200 students completed an online course outside their district in the first year of the new program. Within school districts themselves, online course enrollments are already over 5,000, a sign that students are being channeled into home-district offerings.  If this trend continues, local districts will be offering online courses to their own students—and hardly anyone else. A statewide market needs statewide promotion of alternatives.  But the risk is great that districts will implicitly sign a no-raid pact by not advertising their wares outside their own district. That way each district captures its traditional share of the revenue. It will take an energetic student or parent to secure that out-of-district placement, if guidance counselors, while obeying the letter of the law, nonetheless steer students toward the home-grown option.

One can only speculate at this early stage.  But there seems to be a shadow falling between the Utah rhetoric and the Utah reality.  On the surface, the Utah digital legislation is pathbreaking.  It seems to create multiple new choices for students and families.  But if online learning is going to be of the district, by the district, and for the district, the innovation is unlikely to be transformative.

-Paul E. Peterson

…curtail teacher tenure protection, tie instructors’ compensation and superintendents’ job security to student performance; shift hiring and firing power from school boards to superintendents; create new paths to open charter schools; and establish a statewide program that uses the public-school financing formula to pay private-school tuition for certain low-income students.

It was anything but a cakewalk for the Jindal reform package, as teachers descended on the Capitol to fight the bills and Democrats charged the second-term Republican governor with strong-arm tactics reminiscent of former political tough guys Huey Long and Edwin Edwards. “I make no apologies for having a sense of urgency,” said Jindal. “I was elected to help lead our state. I was not elected just to hold an office.”

Even Diane Ravitch made a trip to Louisiana to cheer-lead the anti-reform troops. As she recounts on her Bridging Differences blog, headlined “Bobby Jindal v. Public Education,” the Louisiana governor is…

….in a race to the bottom with other Republican governors to see who can move fastest to destroy the underpinnings of public education and to instill fear in the hearts of teachers. It’s hard to say which of them is worst: Jindal, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Rick Scott of Florida, John Kasich of Ohio, or …. There are so many contenders for the title, it’s hard to name them all. They all seem to be working from the same playbook: Remove any professionalism and sense of security from teachers; expand privatization as rapidly as possible, through charters and vouchers; intensify reliance on high-stakes tests to evaluate teachers and schools; tighten the regulations on public schools while deregulating the privately managed charter schools. Keep up the attack on many fronts, to confuse the supporters of public education.

Thankfully, an increasing number of parents and voters are not fooled by the rhetoric. And, tellingly, Ravitch leaves off the list of bad guy governors Andrew Cuomo of New York, a Democrat, who has proven himself a champion of education reform. Though there have been many fits-and-starts in the reform movement over the last decade, despite Ravitch’s attempt to portray it as a right-wing conspiracy, one of the more noticeable themes has been that movement’s bipartisanship.  Love it or hate it, No Child Left Behind was a bold cross-the-aisle reform hug and there has been a long line of Democratic education reformers, from Indianapolis mayor Bart Peterson and Chicago mayor Richard Daley, to Democrats for Education Reform to Chris Cerf, the New Jersey education chief who worked in the Clinton administration, to President Obama and Arne Duncan. Adding Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to the list and, as Lyndsey Layton reported last month in the Washington Post, you have “several Democratic mayors in cities across the country—Chicago, Cleveland, Newark and Boston, among them—who are challenging teachers unions in ways that seemed inconceivable just a decade ago.

There is much to work out on the implementation front in Louisiana (and the AP is reporting many battles to come over vouchers), but Jindal’s new superintendent, a Teach for America veteran who cut his reform teeth under Joel Klein in New York (see my story on White here), is well-prepped for the challenge.

Says White,

This is a momentous day for the families of Louisiana…. All students deserve a fair chance in life, and that begins with the opportunity to attend a high-quality school. These policy changes are aligned with that central belief, and Gov. Jindal and state lawmakers have demonstrated a clear commitment to prioritize the educational rights of Louisiana’s next generation above all else.
Congratulations to Louisiana.

-Peter Meyer

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View blog.

Behind the Headline
The Newsroom’s View of Education Reform
Education Next | Summer 2012

In the Wall Street Journal, Stephanie Banchero looks at Louisiana’s newly minted statewide voucher program and at the growth of vouchers nationwide. In an Ed Next article that was posted last week, Mike Petrilli wondered why the national media was ignoring school vouchers.

Then came the meteoric shock of consequential accountability, and student test scores (on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and state exams, too) started to take off. For some subgroups of students, math and reading skills improved by two or three grade levels since just the mid 1990s.

Yet we all know the downsides of the narrow focus on reading and math scores in grades three through eight and once in high school. This regimen puts enormous pressure on schools to ignore or exclude other important subjects (art, music, history, even science). It penalizes schools with an educational strategy that succeeds in the long term but doesn’t produce sky-high scores now. (I’m thinking of Waldorf schools, for instance, such as the preschool my son attends.) And it undervalues other important contributions that schools make, such as to students’ character development and social skills.

When it comes to evaluating teachers, there’s wide agreement that we need to look at student achievement results—but not exclusively. Teaching is a very human act; evaluating good teaching takes human judgment—and the teacher’s role in the school’s life, and her students’ lives, goes beyond measurable academic gains. Thus the interest in regular observations by principals and/or master teachers. These folks can pick up on nuances missed by the value-added data—plus can provide actionable feedback to instructors so that they can improve their craft. (Harrison School District Two in Colorado has one of the best plans in this regard.)

So why do we assume, when it comes to evaluating schools, that we must look at numbers alone? Sure, there have been calls to build additional indicators, beyond test scores, into school grading systems. These might include graduation rates, student or teacher attendance rates, results from student surveys, AP course-taking or exam-passing rates, etc. Our own recent paper on model state accountability systems offers quite a few ideas along these lines. This is all well and good.

But it’s not enough. It still assumes that we can take discrete bits of data and spit out a credible assessment of organizations as complex as schools. That’s not the way it works in businesses, famous for their “bottom lines.” Fund managers don’t just look at the profit and loss statements for the companies in which they invest. They send analysts to go visit with the team, hear about their strategy, kick the tires, talk to insiders, find out what’s really going on. Their assessment starts with the numbers, but it doesn’t end there.

So it should be with school accountability systems. The best ones today take various data points and turn them into user-friendly letter grades, easily understandable by educators, parents, and taxpayers alike. So far so good. Why not add a human component to the process, via school inspectors like those in England? (See this excellent Education Sector paper, by my friend Craig Jerald, for background on how that works.)

Imagine: At least once a year (more would be better) a group of inspectors visits a school. (These would be professionals on contract with the state department of education—typically retired teachers and principals. In the case of charter schools, authorizers would be involved, too.) They would mostly look for two things:

• Evidence that the school is achieving important outcomes that may not be captured by the state accountability system. For example, the school’s administrators might show them test score data from a computer adaptive exam like NWEA’s that demonstrates progress for individual kids (especially those well above or below grade level) that isn’t picked up by the less-sensitive state test. Or perhaps a high school has compelling data about its graduates’ college matriculation and graduation rates that put its mediocre test scores in a different light.
• Indications that the school’s culture and instructional program are inculcating valuable attributes in their students. This is to guard against the “testing factory” phenomenon. Is the school offering a well-balanced curriculum (and extra-curriculars), or engaging in test-prep for weeks on end? Is it focused on teaching “non-cognitive” skills and attributes, such leadership, perseverance, and teamwork? Character traits like empathy, honesty, and courage?

The school visits should not be exercises in excuse-making. This isn’t about lowering expectations because of difficulties particular communities face, or delaying needed changes because the school’s educators appear to be “trying hard.” Rather, it’s a chance to round out the picture generated by the state’s (inevitably) incomplete accountability report.

So here’s how it would work: The state would develop school grades based on a variety of indicators, as it does now. Then those grades could be raised or lowered based on the findings of the school inspectors. (Generally just a letter-grade, but sometimes more.) Grades would go up because of evidence of strong outcomes not captured by the state accountability system; grades would go down because of evidence of unhealthy curricular narrowing.

Such a system would remain imperfect. Human judgment would introduce subjectivity and error into the process. Inspectors might face pressure (maybe even bribes) to raise schools’ grades. And it would be expensive—at least as compared to the testing-and-accountability systems we have now. These issues would need to be addressed.

Still, it’s worth it. To the extent that school grades (and consequences linked to them) drive policy and behavior, we ought to make sure that those grades are informed by more than just numbers. The correct response to the unintended consequences of accountability isn’t to end accountability, but to make it work better. That could have positive consequences for many years to come.

-Michael Petrilli

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Neal McCluskey of the CATO Institute does not think the comparison should be made—on the grounds that the data are “too blunt to tell us much about a single administration’s policies.”  Perhaps, but the same can be said for the growth of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the growth in the number of Americans who are employed. Both are gross, blunt numbers, affected by many factors other than presidential decisions, but the public holds presidents accountable for what happens under their watch. For that very reason, Obama is doing everything he can to pump GDP upward, and the White House staff seized up last Friday when employment figures revealed that the gains were only half what had been anticipated.

The public is right to insist that basic numbers on the ground move in the right direction, no matter how distant from direct presidential control they seem to be. When presidents know they are being held accountable for economic performance, they act more responsibly—or suffer the consequences. If presidents come to learn that they are also being held accountable for the nation’s educational performance, they will think more carefully about the consequences of their actions for students, not job holders.

But, says McCluskey, presidents can’t do much about education in any short period of time. Neither Bush nor Obama should not be given credit or blame for events that happen early in their term of office.   That wave of the hand allows him to slice and dice the numbers to suit his convenience.

But such hand-waving ignores one of Teddy Roosevelt’s keenest insights: The bully pulpit is the most powerful weapon in a president’s arsenal. True about governing in general, it’s of particular significance when it comes to education. For learning to take place, teachers, students, administrators, parents and neighbors must all be committed to the enterprise.

To mobilize broad movement toward a common goal is a job for presidents.  They are the ones best placed to energize a nation, and some presidents have done just that.

Ronald Reagan reversed the downward trend in SAT scores almost overnight when his National Commission on Educational Excellence galvanized the nation to take the educational crisis seriously. At the time Congress passed no law, and no pile of money was added to the pot, but the White House message had a major impact nonetheless.  (For details, see chapter 8 in my book, Saving Schools).

Similarly, George W. Bush, both in his 2000 campaign and immediately upon assuming office, insistently called for accountability reforms that would lead to No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  It was not the law’s rules and regulations but the national attention that had the impact.  Schools, students, and teachers were put on notice that more was expected.  NAEP scores jumped noticeably—from the very beginning of the Bush term.

Though presidents usually enjoy the biggest bully pulpit, Martin Luther King proved no less influential.  When he called for equal educational opportunity in the South, the test scores of African American students in southern states rose dramatically. The biggest gains were among the high school students most susceptible to the calls of the civil rights movement.

The U. S. Department of Education has encouraged a certain amount of reform with its convoluted Race to the Top initiative.  But President Obama’s first—and most powerful— education message to all Americans came with his stimulus package. He urged its passage not so that children might learn but in order that teachers might keep their jobs. That was precisely the wrong signal, and it is not surprising that NAEP gains slowed to a virtual halt.  The stimulus package did little for the nation’s GDP, and it has had a negative impact on its education GDP.

-Paul Peterson

A couple of headlines from the meta-analysis are worth spotlighting here.

First, the work shines some questions on Benjamin Bloom’s analysis from a couple decades ago that suggested that well-designed human tutoring could deliver around a whopping 2 standard deviations worth of learning performance. VanLehn’s paper suggests that the effect size seems to be more around 0.79 than 2 standard deviations—still, nothing at which to scoff.

Second, as Saxberg details, VanLehn does some important work in splitting up the types of tutoring research by “grain size”: answer-based tutors, step-based tutors, substep-based tutors, and human tutoring, as well as by the type of student behavior, which ranges from passive to active to constructive and finally interactive.  Stunningly, the typical answer-based tutoring systems average an effect size of around 0.35 standard deviations, and all three of the step-based, substep-based, and human tutoring cluster around an effect size of 0.75 standard deviations. In other words, some machine-based tutoring is approaching the effect size of real human tutoring—and there is less variation than one might expect as the grain size of tutoring becomes finer. This finding is a startling observation.

Saxberg makes some great points on the cautions and potential of this research, as well as the questions we should be continuing to ask. I just want to talk briefly about this from the angle of disruptive innovation and think about how we might implement these tutoring solutions at scale.

As Saxberg writes, great human tutoring is wonderful if you can get it, but simply isn’t practical at scale. We know that the vast majority of learners that could benefit from tutoring simply don’t have access to any at all (some have suggested this number approaches 80 percent of students). This means that there is a lot of nonconsumption in the tutoring space to launch disruptive innovations that utilize the power of machine tutoring at a much lower price point in a manner far more accessible and convenient than are human tutors to millions or even billions around the world. The wrong tactic for entrepreneurs debuting these solutions is to compete head on against existing solutions where the performance won’t be as good. They should instead focus on where the advantages of convenience, accessibility, simplicity, and affordability are valued and more important than absolute efficacy.

By competing against nonconsumption where this is the case, for those who suggest that the machine-based tutoring isn’t as good as the best that’s out there, that will be the answer to the wrong question, as it will be way better than the alternative—nothing at all. And as the research illustrates, it’s a good deal better than that even at this point.

What’s predictable about technology is that it improves constantly year over year, so what at one point isn’t good enough for most, over time will actually overshoot what many need from it. The lessons from disruptive innovation suggest that these technologies may never be as good as the absolute best human tutor (for example, the raw capacity of vacuum tubes still outpaces that of transistors, which disrupted the vacuum tubes in the consumer electronics market), but they will be plenty close. And as they improve, the machine-based tutoring technologies will become good enough for those who could or would have paid full price or changed up their schedule to connect with a human tutor, such that machine-based tutoring may well be the norm for many of us as a prime mode of learning in the future.

In some ways, the Khan Academy and other start-ups are packing in some elements of these machine-based tutoring systems as they evolve and grow, such that this revolution is really already under way.

When I was writing Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, I often wondered whether the subtitle should be “For every child, a tutor.” As the research shows, that vision may not be so far-fetched.

-Michael Horn

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

Folks are genuinely looking for opportunities to make peace and not war….  And I think that’s terrific. But someone has to make war.

Who better to lead the troops than Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and Eva Moskowitz, three of the most aggressive education reformers of the last decade, or, if you prefer, as Phillips has it, “some of the most well-known and polarizing figures in public education.”

A triumvirate of kumbaya they are not.

And what they have now done is form a group that intends to raise $10 million annually for the next five years to lobby the New York State legislature to protect the reform initiatives launched by Klein and his mayoral boss Michael Bloomberg in New York City, promote reform throughout the state, and, as Phillips writes,

…neutralize the might of the teachers’ unions, whose money, endorsements and get-out-the-vote efforts have swung many close elections.

Bloomberg’s third (and this time final) term expires at the end of next year. Says Phillips,

[T]he campaign is beginning while advocates of reform have an ally in the mayor. But their eyes are focused on 2014, when a new mayor—most likely one who is more sympathetic to the teachers’ union than Mr. Bloomberg has been—enters office.

In fact, the law to renew mayoral control over Gotham’s schools expires in 2015 and may pose an interesting early challenge for the group: What if, as Phillips suggests, the new mayor is not a friend of education reform?

The group, StudentsFirstNY (no webpage yet) has a bunch of hedge-funders and venture capitalists (not named by Phillips) involved and will be lead by Micah Lasher, the barely 30-year-old “magical wunderkind lobbyist,” as Gotham Schools dubbed him a couple of years ago, when Bloomberg sent him to Albany as the city’s lobbyist.

Let the games—er, battles—begin.

-Peter Meyer

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View blog.

In American public education today, however, that equation is sorely unbalanced. A school principal in 2012 is accountable for student achievement, for discipline, for curriculum and instruction, and for leading (and supervising) the staff team, not to mention attracting students, satisfying parents, and collaborating with innumerable other agencies and organizations.

Yet that same principal controls only a tiny part of his school’s budget, has scant say over who teaches there, practically no authority when it comes to calendar or schedule, and minimal leverage over the curriculum itself. Instead of deploying all available school assets in ways that would do the most good for the most kids, the principal is required to follow dozens or hundreds of rules, program requirements, spending procedures, discipline codes, contract clauses, and regulations emanating from at least three levels of government–none of which strives to coordinate with any of the others.

In short, we give our school heads the responsibility of CEO’s but the authority of middle-level bureaucrats.

That cannot work well and most of the time does not, save for the occasional super-hero principal who must act like a maverick — breaking or ignoring most of the rules — in order to cope with an inherently absurd imbalance.

To top it off, today’s school principals get paid barely more than the senior teachers in their schools, though they typically work year-round versus the classic 180-day, 9-month teacher contract.

No wonder principals are retiring in droves. No wonder many of our ablest young educators –such as those emerging from the Teach for America program — shun the principal’s office, at least in district-operated schools. (Many gravitate to the charter-school sector, where principals have far greater authority.) No wonder entrepreneurs, risk-takers, and change agents seldom last long as principals, or that many of those who do endure are people content in middle-manager roles.

This situation grows worse with every passing year, as federal, state, and district programs multiply and become more rule-bound — by, for example, “special education” and “No Child Left Behind”; judges issue more rulings that bind the principal’s hands; union contracts lengthen and become more restrictive; funding levels off; and teacher layoffs become unavoidable, resulting in even less discretionary money at the building level and, because of seniority and tenure rules, less say over who works there.

The underlying causes are threefold.

First, a dysfunctional and archaic governance structure for public education that pays homage to “local control” yet turns into bureaucratic management of dozens or hundreds of schools from burgeoning “central offices,” rather than vesting any real control at the level closest to teachers, students, and parents. Setting policy for that system, typically, is an elected school board that itself has grown dysfunctional, particularly in urban America, as adult interest groups manipulate who serves on it. Atop all this sit state and federal agencies — multiple agencies at each level — as well as (in many states) county or regional administrative units.

Second, we’ve layered so many responsibilities on our schools that the teaching and learning of basic skills and essential knowledge has all but vanished under efforts to rectify injustice, foster diversity, provide multiple services to kids with varying needs, prevent drug abuse, adolescent pregnancy and obesity, forge character, keep children off the streets, ensure physical fitness, and observe a near-infinity of special events, holidays, and interest-group enthusiasm.

Third, every time something goes wrong anywhere, a blizzard of new rules and procedures descends upon the school’s obligations, lest that mishap recur anywhere else. Whether it’s bullying or a playground accident, an unwanted intruder or a disgruntled parent, a kid who doesn’t get into a particular course or a library book that offends someone, the checklists, regulations, and prohibitions multiply.

What’s a principal to do? If his or her state (like Florida or California) has a universal class-size limit, he or she cannot even rearrange student and teacher assignments to make the best use of the school’s instructional team. If a state tenure law or district union contract insists that, in a layoff situation, the newest teachers must be let go first, he or she will have no say over who ends up teaching in his school. (Never mind that the reduction in instructional force doesn’t obviate the class size limit!) If a district policy (or court order) says no student can be suspended or expelled regardless of the offense, simply maintaining order within the school may prove impossible. (In the opposite case, a “zero tolerance” law may leave the principal with no discretion even for a first offender who didn’t mean any harm. Remember those six-year-olds who bring TOY weapons for “show and tell”?)

This gigantic mismatch between responsibility and authority has no discrete remedy. What’s needed is a radical simplification, replacing rules with responsibility on the part of the people running our schools. If we don’t give principals the authority to do their jobs, we are going to have few competent leaders for our schools, which means we’re not going to have many effective schools or well-educated children tomorrow.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This essay was originally published by TheAtlantic.com as part of its “America the Fixable” series.

NBC has concentrated on initiatives favored by self-styled education reformers. The network has been particularly generous to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting teacher merit pay proposals and privately run charter schools – an agenda strongly opposed by many public school teachers, labor unions and educators.

During its first “Education Nation” summit in 2010, for example, “NBC Nightly News” aired a profile of a Gates Foundation initiative, “Measures of Effective Teaching,” which seeks to create a database of effective teaching methods. The reporter was former NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw. During the second summit last fall, Brokaw showed up on “Today” with Melinda Gates to discuss the same Gates initiative. Turning from reporter to advocate, Brokaw told host Natalie Morales, “So what Bill and Melinda have done, and it’s a great credit to them, and it’s a great gift to this country, is that they have taken the kind of episodic values that we know about teaching and they’ve put them together in a way that everyone can learn from them. So that’s a big, big step.”

And Farhi’s not wrong; the media has indeed been obsessed with the teacher effectiveness agenda. That’s one finding of my own analysis of education reporting that I just published in Education Next. My team and I coded all of the national education stories published in 2011 in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, and Associated Press. And sure enough, teacher-related policies were covered more than any other topic.

But can you really blame the reporters? As former Secretary of Education Rod Paige once explained to me, journalists are in the “conflict business,” and there was a ton of conflict around teacher policies (LIFO, teacher evaluations, tenure, etc.) in 2011. (Remember Madison and Columbus?)

Farhi and I also agree about the downer tone of much reporting. Results from the various NAEP exams were big drivers of education coverage in 2011 too—and the presentation was overwhelmingly negative, even though many groups of students made historic gains. Cheating by teachers was another major story—and we all know how uplifting that one is.

Where I disagree with Farhi, however, is in lumping all reforms together. Consider school vouchers. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page may have declared 2011 the “year of school choice,” but its news side dedicated exactly zero articles to the topic. And it wasn’t alone; only the A.P. published a story (just one) on the wave of voucher and tax credit bills enacted by Republican legislatures and governors last year. This wasn’t important enough a development to find space in the Times or Washington Post?

So Farhi could have been more precise: Journalists (especially broadcast journalists) are enamored with policies put forward by lefty reformers. And with the mainstream media’s liberal leanings, this makes sense. And goes to show, once again, that the most interesting fights in education reform today are intramural battles among the progressive elite.

See my full Education Next article here.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry also appears on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Even though the Miami New Times article was just a re-hash of an article they had run during the summer before, critics of special ed vouchers seized upon the piece as proof of the need to stop the rapid expansion of that type of program to other states, impose heavy regulations on Florida’s program to ensure that nothing bad could ever happen, or just shut down special ed programs because only public provision of services to disabled students could be trusted.

Diane Ravitch, in her usual scholarly and measured way, responded to the article by tweeting “Legalized child abuse in Florida?” Sara Mead, Andy Rotherham, and Ed Sector all circulated the New Times piece as proof of their earlier criticisms of McKay.  When I attempted to put the scandal in perspective relative to misconduct and incompetence that is all too common in traditional public schools, Sara Mead clucked that I was like a child trying to excuse misbehavior by crying “he did it first!”

Well, I wonder if a story out of Alabama might help put things in perspective without sounding like an unreasonable child.  It’s a story about a boy named Jose Salinas, or Little Joe, who has cerebral palsy.  His mother wondered why he was acting unusually and repeatedly claiming that he couldn’t go to school because he wasn’t feeling well.  So, she decided to attached a secret audio recording device to his wheelchair to find out what was going on at school.

Here is what she discovered:

“You drooled on the paper,” teacher’s aide Drew Faircloth could be heard saying impatiently. “That’s disgusting.”

“Keep your mouth closed and don’t drool on my paper,” teacher Alicia Brown said on the tape. “I do not want to touch your drool. Do you understand that? Obviously, you don’t.”

Over the three days of recordings, Salinas said Jose received about 20 minutes of actual instruction and spent almost the entire day sitting in silence with no one speaking to him.

“I could not believe someone would treat a child that way, much less a special needs child,” Melisha Salinas told ABCNews.com. “The anger in his voices … and the thing he was getting angry about, [Jose] just can’t help.”

“Why is my paper wet?” Brown demanded. “Look at me and answer. That’s not an answer. That’s not even a word.”

“Do you seen anybody else at this table drooling? Then, stop,” she said. “You have got drool all over your face and it is gross.”

Little Joe’s mom took the recording to school officials who suspended the teachers with pay.  But within days the teachers were back working in the school, although no longer assigned to Little Joe.  Angry parents protested the return of the teachers, who were then once again placed on administrative leave with pay.

Houston County Schools superintendent Tim Pitchford helped explain:

“I made a poor decision and re-assigned them back to school,” he said. “It was the wrong decision and I accept full responsibility.”

Alabama state law does not allow superintendents to fire teachers on the spot, Pitchford said. He has to make a recommendation to the board, which makes the final decision.

“From day one, it was obvious where this was going to end with the employees,” he said. “We knew where this process was going to end, but the process does not allow it to be immediate.”

Salinas was shocked to hear the teacher and aide were back at school.

“They were back at the school and my children were there so I got them out of school and so did several angry parents,” Salinas said. “I just lost all hope. Nobody was listening to me.”

Of course, if Alabama had a special ed voucher program, like McKay, Mrs. Salinas would not have had to secretly record misconduct, prove it to school officials, and then organize a protest to ensure that those teachers were not still in the school with her son.  She could have just followed her good mother’s perception that things were going very badly and switched her child to another school with the same amount of public funding.  How many Little Joe’s are out there without having their mistreatment recorded or protests organized?

Of course, examples of misconduct in traditional public schools is no more proof of the merits of McKay-like programs than examples of misconduct are proof of the need to regulate or eliminate special ed vouchers.  For more systematic evidence on the merits of McKay, readers may wish to read the article that Marcus Winters and I published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, the leading AERA empirical journal, which finds that McKay competition increases student achievement for disabled students who remain in traditional public schools and lowers the rate at which students are newly identified as disabled.

But some people prefer mindless tweets over systematic evidence.  And somehow I don’t expect Diane Ravitch, Sara Mead, or Andy Rotherham now to tweet that Little Joe proves the wisdom of McKay or that traditional public schools are equivalent to child abuse.  They prefer to be selective in the anecdotes they tweet.

-Jay P. Greene

The overall idea of weighted student funding—that some students require more resources than others because they require extra educational services—makes sense intuitively and provides a sensible way for states to think about pieces of their school finance systems. The usual categories of students requiring “weights” are those in special education, disadvantaged students as generally defined by family income, and English-language learners.

Indeed, every state in the union currently uses some version of weighted funding, either through explicit inclusion in its funding formula or through allocations using “weighted students” instead of actual students. The federal government’s most significant K-12 spending programs target disadvantaged students (through Title I) and students with disabilities (via the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act).

Given that, why is weighted student funding such a common element of reform? The prevailing idea that drives the somewhat surprising alliance of right and left goes beyond simply funding districts according to assessments of needs based on poverty status, special education, language deficiencies, and the like. The reform envisioned is not so much about providing differential dollars based on student needs, but about changing who makes funding decisions. The supporters also importantly call for dollars to go directly to individual schools based on these categorizations of student needs, with individual budget decisions being made at the school level. The unstated goal is to bypass any decisionmaking at the district level—where each group sees intractably bad political outcomes.

But hoping that a new distribution of funding that goes directly to the school level—call it school-based weighted funding—will create the right incentives appears both misguided and possibly harmful.

Let’s dig deeper here. Liberals like the concept of school-based weighted funding because they believe it would push money to schools that serve more-disadvantaged populations, and they tend to focus most on funding variations within urban districts. The highest-poverty schools in urban areas traditionally have received less funding than more-advantaged schools, not because of programmatic disparities, but largely because they employ more rookie teachers who come with lower salaries than more-senior educators.

These liberals ignore the fact that local schools have no control over teacher salaries or, for the most part, over the choice of teachers. Thus, the added dollars from the weighted student funding seldom empower them to make choices that improve the quality of teachers. As a result, the benefit of additional funding in a world where the quality of teachers is unrelated to the salary of individual teachers is murky at best.

By contrast, conservatives like the idea because, in their vision, it would push funding to charter schools that traditionally have received less-than-equal shares of federal, state, and local aid. Conservatives focused largely on the federal and state dollars ignore the fact that local funding would not necessarily flow with the child to the charter school under a weighted system. Redirecting the revenue stream would not achieve the parity they seek for charter schools without altering significantly the varied arrangements nationwide for state and local school finance.

At their heart, both positions rely upon an untested view of politics: If only the actual flow of dollars were more transparent, political forces would be inescapably set in motion that would in turn eliminate the current shackles on schools and allow them to make the decisions needed to improve achievement.

We should have absolutely no reason to believe that such a vision will come to fruition. For one, for the vision to hold, we must ignore any questions about decisionmaking capacities at the school level.

The underlying motivation for weighted student funding is built on a presumption that districts are making patently bad decisions, either because of a lack of capacity or distorted incentives. Is it the case that these problems appear just at the district level, but not the school level? Why do we believe that school-level personnel—without any prior training and experience—will become better stewards of resources or better judges of personnel, curricula, or instructional techniques?

“The reform envisioned is not so much about providing differential dollars based on student needs, but about changing who makes funding decisions.”

Additionally, we must believe that public pressure set in motion by this formulaic funding of schools will sweep away the rigidities of contracts, the desire to insulate the system from competitive pressures, and the interests of current personnel, and will lead to better solutions. Neither of these underlying presumptions appears plausible. What appears to be happening is that we are attempting to produce fresh approaches to regulating the process of education, only at a different level of governance.

Liberals and conservatives both want improved achievement of all students, but achieving that seems much more likely through rewarding success, rather than relying on the hope that a naive model of political reaction would work better. In simplest terms, weighted student funding does little or nothing to alter incentives for performance in the schools unless the vague hopes behind these ideas are realized.

A contrasting perspective can be seen in funding ideas that change incentives, developed in a book by Alfred Lindseth and me, Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses. Provide funding to districts that adjusts the base amount for each student—disadvantaged students, English-language learners, or special education students—to reflect differences in education needs. But, having provided funding that recognizes different needs, reward districts that promote greater student achievement. And, don’t reward schools and districts where students fail to improve their performance. In other words, provide incentives for greater achievement, and do not reward failure. The different levels of funding compensate districts and schools for different demands on them, but the hopes for improved achievement come from providing incentives directly related to student achievement.

One premise of this alternative is that it is necessary to be clear about what outcomes need to be, but to allow districts to decide how to achieve those goals. Districts may find it useful in their management to employ some sort of weighted student funding for individual schools, but they might alternatively rely on strong district leadership and more-centralized funding decisions. It simply doesn’t make sense to try to dictate management rules from the state or national capital.

Schools will not improve until there are greater incentives for improving student achievement. Redistributing funds across schools or increasing the funding to schools by themselves will not magically put us on this path.

-Eric Hanushek

This commentary also appeared in Education Week.

Anyway, wanted to share one title that’s uber-relevant today. It’s Great Promise Thwarted: The Humbling History of the Common Core, 2008-2018. It’ll be written by my good friend, eminent NYU edu-historian Jonathan Zimmerman, and e-published by Harvard University Press, in 2022.

It’s worth quoting a long excerpt from the book’s conclusion:

For a brief time, during 2010-2012, the success of the Common Core seemed assured. Proponents had compelling arguments. Existing state standards were generally awful. The No Child Left Behind accountability system designed to accommodate variation in state standards and assessments was problematic. Conservative supporters argued that the Core would make it possible to do away with intrusive federal regulations governing accountability and easier to provide transparency and accountability with a light touch. Moreover, the Core would make it possible to credibly compare student and school performance across the nation, while allowing mobile students or those learning online to move across schools or programs with minimal disruption.
Proponents argued that the Core would reduce the barriers that hindered virtual schools, online instruction, and the emergence of “21st century” assessments and instructional tools. Observers generally characterized the standards as a substantial improvement on those in place in most states. And Core proponents enjoyed enormous political muscle. A push that would have been laughable in 2006 seemed a fait accompli by 2010, with forty-plus states on board. The effort enjoyed the enthusiastic backing of the Gates Foundation (what we today would call Gates-ECB; this was before the Foundation absorbed the European Central Bank following the third Greek default), the Obama administration, nearly the whole of the education “reform” community, and Republican leaders including both members of the 2016 GOP presidential ticket. Major publishers and test-developers were quiescent or supportive, while education technology entrepreneurs were enthusiastic.

So, what went wrong? Why is it that today just eleven states use a Common Core assessment, less than a third of the states are judged to have made any effort to adhere to the Core, and the phrase “Common Core” remains polarizing and generally unpopular with Republicans, parents, and teachers? How did such a promising effort run aground?

In hindsight, four factors were responsible. Notably, none turned on technical debates over the merits and rigor of the standards. All were the product, to varying degrees, of the “we’re-in-a-hurry” hubris that has so often humbled would-be social reformers. Indeed, as one of the Core’s great champions, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation president Chester E. Finn, Jr.,prophetically wrote in early 2012, “It will, of course, be ironic as well as unfortunate if the Common Core ends up in the dustbin of history as a result of actions and comments by its supporters.”

First, an effort that began as a bipartisan, state-driven enterprise, spearheaded by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, started to look to skeptics like a federally-inspired, politicized project. The Department of Education’s decision to link federal funding to the Core in its Race to the Top program, its NCLB waiver effort, and its “ESEA blueprint,” and the provision of $350 million in federal funds for Core-related tests, all alienated anti-Washington conservatives who would have remained neutral if the question had merely concerned states collaborating to set standards in math and English language arts. By the time nationally influential conservative pundit George Will questioned in 2012 whether the federal government had exceeded its legal authority, the challenge for proponents was clear. Indeed, “Tea Party” conservatives came to regard the Common Core as part and parcel of Obama administration efforts to extend the federal role in domestic policy, an extension of contemporaneous fights over health care, spending, clean energy, the auto industry, housing, and financial regulation. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan demonstrated an unfortunate knack for making it appear that the Core was a pet Obama project–initially, when he excoriated South Carolina in 2012 for expressing second thoughts, but most famously when he futilely blasted the dozen states that announced their “implementation hiatus” in 2014. All of this served to make the Core a partisan question viewed with suspicion by conservatives, undermining the bipartisan support needed to sustain implementation in many “red” and “purple” states.

Second, the Common Core advocates were tripped up by their own impatience. After nearly all states adopted the Common Core in an early rush, proponents exhibited little interest in making the case for its merits, responding to critics, or explaining what was in store. Outside of the occasional op-ed, little sustained attention was devoted to explaining the changes or building broad-based support. For instance, hardly anyone other than Core enthusiasts realized that the comfortable, familiar high school math curriculum of math, algebra and geometry was to be eliminated and replaced with the antiseptically titled Integrated Math I, II, and III. When the magnitude of the shift became clear in 2014, confused parents and irate math teachers bombarded legislators and state board members with calls to delay implementation or alter course. Enthusiasts concentrated on designing instructional materials, consulting with states and districts, and training leaders and teachers, seemingly presuming that the public knew what they were up to and supported their effort. In the event, this turned out to be a fatal miscalculation. The early success of the Common Core was remarkable, but proponents failed to recognize that this quick success meant few voters or legislators really understood what was involved or that real success would depend crucially on the breadth and depth of support.

Third, Core advocates never did a good job of explaining how their efforts intersected with other reform priorities. Observers asked about whether the math assessment would strangle the abilities of charter schools or specialty district schools to use nonstandard math curricula. Core proponents never really answered such questions in public, tending instead to favor quiet, technical fixes (in this case abandoning mandatory “through-course” assessment) that didn’t address broader concerns. Skeptics wondered whether the testing “windows” needed to assess all children with the new computer-assisted tests would be so wide as to undermine the viability of sophisticated value-added evaluation systems that states were eagerly building. TheWashington Post’s Jay Mathews pointed out, in 2012, that the new assessments would “delay, if not stop altogether, the national move toward rating teachers by student score improvements” and that radical change would force systems “to wait years to work out the kinks in the tests” before they could resume those efforts. In hindsight, the backlash produced by the chaos over teacher evaluation and school accountability systems during 2014 and 2015 was predictable and preventable.

Finally, insufficient public attention to practical questions of cost, technology, and practice ultimately proved crippling. Despite frenzied efforts to support new assessments, instructional materials, and implementation during 2011-2014, interviews from that era with state legislators, district officials, educators, and parents showed remarkably little awareness of the costs and practical difficulties that lay ahead. When the 2012 technology scan showed that most districts had the requisite technology platform, few realized that the minimum specs had been dumbed-down or that this meant the new tests would sacrifice most of the hoped-for features–turning them into little more than traditional paper-and-pencil tests taken on a computer. At the same time, lousy records and a desire to avoid embarrassment meant that many districts had overstated their capacity in the tech census; they were suddenly faced with millions or even hundreds of millions in unanticipated new expenses, even as they dealt with the practical headaches of inadequate technology. And when the price tag for the full cost of new technology, training, leadership, teacher preparation, and all the rest became clear in 2014 and 2015, just as states emerging from the Great Recession were restoring cuts to state agencies and hoping to trim taxes, it was no surprise that a slew of states decided they’d keep the Core standards but also their old assessments, instructional materials, training, and teacher preparation.

The Core is still with us, of course, but it remains a shadow of what its more optimistic proponents envisioned a decade ago.

As I perused Zimmerman’s account, I could only feel for my many friends working so hard to make the Common Core a success. But then I thought, “Wait a minute. The future hasn’t happened yet. It’s like Marty McFly using his knowledge of the future to change the future. They can still alter course.” Will they? I suppose that’s up to them.

(Oh, and by the way, my favorite paper from the 2022 AERA conference? “When All Your Hurtful Yesterdays Become All My Gendered Tomorrows”: Transgressive Ontologies Disrupting the Heteronormative Praxis Posed by a Post-Foulcauldian, Neo-Ravitchian Autoethnography of the Lived Lives of Three Indigenous Culture-walkers in a Neo-liberal Dystopia.)

-Frederick Hess

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

One hundred years ago, a progressive populist barnstormed the country, delivering fiery speeches and railing against the gold standard. Today another progressive populist barnstorms the country, delivering fiery speeches and railing against academic standards. Meet Alfie Kohn, the William Jennings Bryan of our age.

Like most demagogues, Kohn knows how to tap into his audience’s raw emotions—anger, feelings of powerlessness, and resentment of a ruling elite. In his case, he puts voice to what many educators already believe: That school reform is a corporate plot to turn young people into docile employees; that an obsession with standardized testing is crowding out any real intellectual engagement in our schools; and that teachers have no say over what happens inside their own classrooms.

These arguments are half-crazy and half-true, which is what makes Kohn so effective—and so maddening.

Where Kohn gets it right is in his observation that many American schools are “mindless, soul-killing” institutions, especially the schools serving our most disadvantaged communities. While this has almost certainly been the case for decades, it’s probably true that test-based accountability has made the situation worse, at least in many locales.

Even the most hawkish reformer must blush at depictions of the endless test prep and shamefully narrowed curriculum that is present at too many inner city schools. “That’s not what we intended for them to do,” we reformers say, but the combination of high pressure and low capacity too often leads educators to panic and look for shortcuts to higher test scores. We can’t just look the other way and pretend it’s not happening.

Where Kohn gets it wrong, however, is in his vision for a better education system. Here he’s an unreconstructed John Dewey acolyte, right down the line. He views all the markers of “traditional” education with suspicion, from grading to lecturing to teachers asserting their authority.

He doesn’t just think that the focus on testing has gone overboard, he actually asserts that rising test scores indicate malevolent behavior. If the scores at your child’s school go up, he claimed in a recent speech, “either it’s meaningless or it’s bad news.”

Really? Kohn refuses to consider the hundreds (maybe thousands) of “traditional” schools that produce great test scores and give their students a rich, intellectually stimulating experience. What about Catholic schools, those unabashedly “authoritative” institutions that for 100 years have helped poor, minority and immigrant children get started on a path to the middle class?

What about the nation’s high-flying charter schools, such those in the KIPP network, which boast high student achievement and a well-rounded curriculum (including art and music for everybody!)? And what about Finland—the cause célèbre of progressive educators—which boasts “authentic” learning and sky-high test scores?

What Kohn refuses to wrestle with is the argument—made by Core Knowledge creator E.D. Hirsch Jr., among others—that progressive education might work well for children of the affluent but tends to be disastrous for children of the poor.

Democratic decision-making, self-directed studies, internal motivation, and the like are wonderful aspirations. But when it comes to lifting children out of poverty, heavy doses of basic skills, rich content, and clear expectations have been proven time and again to be more effective.

That’s not to be mistaken for the “mindless, soul-killing” teaching that Kohn bemoans, but it’s also not the progressive utopia he envisions, either.

What Kohn and other reactionaries refuse to acknowledge is that what fuels the modern school reform movement is not acquiescence to Corporate America but outrage at the nation’s lack of social mobility.

As Kati Haycock of the (very liberal) Education Trust has argued, “We take the children who need the most and give them the least”—schools with the least resources, least qualified teachers, and least challenge. Kohn is right that test scores are most closely related to social class; changing that brutal fact is what the reform movement is all about.

But Kohn would rather spar with boogeymen like the “Billionaire Boys Club”—the label Diane Ravitch affixed to reform-minded philanthropists—than the pro-reform civil rights groups they support. Does Kohn think that these organizations—from Education Trust to the National Council of La Raza to the United Negro College Fund and on and on—are dupes when they equate higher test scores for poor kids with better life opportunities?

Kohn might want to familiarize himself with the recent blockbuster study by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff, which illustrated the enormous impact an effective teacher could have on her students’ life chances. But, as the (liberal) Kevin Carey wrote at the time of its release, it also indicated the connection between test scores and outcomes in the real world:

If you believe standardized tests are worthless or highly flawed or deeply inadequate or even troublingly limited in accuracy and scope—and many reasonable people believe these things—then you could dismiss or downplay value-added measures of teacher effectiveness, by definition. …

But now the [Chetty-Friedman-Rockoff] study says that teachers who are unusually good at helping students score high on standardized tests today aren’t just unusually good at helping students score high on standardized tests tomorrow. They also have an unusual effect on the likelihood of students going to college, going to a good college, earning a good living, living in a nice place, and saving for retirement.

In other words, whatever the limitations of standardized tests may be, test-based value-added scores do, in fact, provide valuable information about the things most people care most about.

Kohn argues that if test scores don’t matter and are antithetical to real learning, then the entire school-reform movement is built on quicksand. But what if test scores do matter—a lot—especially for our society’s most vulnerable children? Is Kohn willing to acknowledge that his progressive vision is too dismissive of the importance of basic knowledge and skills?

Alfie Kohn isn’t evil, as some social conservatives have implied. He’s right that what passes for education in too many of our schools should be the cause of outrage and fundamental change. But he’s wrong that resisting “reform” is a clear path to a better future for our children.

His progressive vision might do no serious harm in schools serving affluent children—kids who are getting the basic skills, strong vocabulary, and internal motivation at home. But backing away from accountability, teacher effectiveness, and academic “rigor” would likely create an even bleaker future for children growing up in poverty—children for whom school matters most.

Kohn’s populism, like William Jennings Bryan’s before him, stirs emotions, but doesn’t point toward a positive program, especially for the poor. There’s plenty to criticize when it comes to testing, merit pay and the rest. Midcourse corrections are called for.

But Mr. Kohn: Education reform shall not be crucified on a cross of “no.”

-Michael Petrilli

This post originally appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

To me, this suggests the need for recruiting a deeper, richer, more diverse pool of leadership talent, from inside and outside of schools, and then deliberately training them in a fashion that permits them to learn from peers outside of K-12, exposes them to leadership and management thinking from outside K-12, and integrates thinking on entrepreneurship and unbundling (see Education Unbound for more context) into the very fabric of their preparation. There are a handful of current efforts seeking to do just this.

For my money, one of the more interesting of those efforts is Rice University’s Education Entrepreneurship Program (REEP). Launched in 2008 and housed in Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business, REEP is designed to prepare select Houston-area educators (from districts and charters) to become transformative school leaders. (Full disclosure: I was recruited in 2008 by my friends Mike Feinberg and Leo Linbeck to help design REEP and continue to serve as the lead education faculty member.)

How does REEP actually work? Practically and legally, how does one prepare certified edu-leaders in a school of business? How did REEP get started, and what are the lessons for those enamored by the model? How does REEP training differ from that offered in traditional ed admin programs? My crack colleague Daniel Lautzenheiser and I examined these questions in “Educational Leadership for a New Era:The Rice University Education Entrepreneurship Program,” just published last week by REEP. Here are a few key takeaways; if you’re interested, check out the full piece.

REEP’s basic premise is that key leadership and management skills are universal, regardless of one’s field of endeavor, and that aspiring K-12 leaders can actually become more adept at these skills by learning with and from peers and faculty who have diverse expertise and experiences. In holding that “school leadership” is not as unique as generations of ed leadership experts have suggested, REEP offers a sharp and significant break with traditional practice. At a practical level, Rice is the first institution in the nation allowed to issue would-be administrators a state principal certification through a business school. The REEP model makes it possible for full-time teachers and administrators to pursue either a two-year MBA (via Rice’s MBA for Professionals track) or a one-year fellowship via the Jones School’s Executive Education training program.

Daniel and I conclude the piece by flagging key lessons evident in Rice’s early experience. I’ll highlight six of those here:

Advantages
• Fresh opportunity to build an innovative program. Unlike most ed school-business school partnerships, which inevitably draw upon the faculty and programs already in place, Rice was able to build a unique education leadership training program from scratch. This opportunity to start fresh meant that REEP could use the expertise of the Jones School without worrying about stepping on the toes of an ed school or having to use education faculty.
• A chance to cultivate the local talent pool. Unlike education leadership programs with a more national focus, REEP was designed to cultivate the talent pool in one community. REEP’s design is intended to offer an alluring new path to potential leaders, to keep those talented leaders in the local ecosystem, to forge new ties across districts and across the district and charter sectors, and to infuse local leadership with thinking and networks that stretch beyond the narrow world of K-12.

Challenges
• Squeezing a different approach into a self-assured field. A key tension for programs like REEP is the attempt to pioneer a new direction in leadership training while having to comply with state-level guidelines that presuppose a particular approach to training school leaders. These “correct” approaches to K-12 leadership imply certainty on questions that most non-K-12 authorities in management and leadership regard as uncertain.
• Can leaders use what they’re learning? Business schools often operate under the assumption that leaders have a substantial ability to reallocate time, staff, and dollars and to remake routines. However, in K-12, leaders often operate in highly constrained environments.

Lessons Learned
• Influentials committed to the effort. Inside and outside of Rice, REEP enjoyed advocates who helped it clear logistical hurdles, secure funds, develop local relationships, and recruit students and a national faculty. Equally critical was support from the Jones School. On the outside, REEP’s advisory board included key contacts in leadership roles in local school districts, in high-profile charter management organizations, and at Teach For America. This helped with visibility, coordination, and recruitment.
• Doubts about whether REEP could be launched at an institution with an education school. Those involved in launching REEP repeatedly expressed skepticism that they could have built it at Rice if an education school had been in place. Those who had dealt with other local schools of education spoke of the frustrations of having to negotiate ways to ensure that new programs didn’t step on the toes of established programs or faculty members. Rethinking the assumptions of how to train school leaders was thought to be possible only when working on a fresh slate.

-Rick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

This month, the Council on Foreign Relations issued a report calling in the name of national security for national curriculum-content standards on science, civics, foreign languages, technology, creativity, and problem-solving – for elementary and secondary education.

Co-chairman of the task force that sponsored the report was Joel Klein, former chancellor of New York City’s schools.  Klein told PBC Newshour in a March 20 interview that one of the most important levers that the report focuses on is the “whole nationalization” of curriculum-content standards through the national Common Core standards for English and math, which are endorsed by the Obama administration and whose implementation is  currently being supported by millions in federal funds.  Klein and his task force want to extend the current national English and math standards by adding science, civics and the other curriculum subject-matter.

The Council on Foreign Relations report also criticizes multiple-choice questions and short essays and calls for replacing these, to the extent possible, with federally-funded national tests that are “interdisciplinary” simulations of “real world” circumstances.  They call for national tests of “decision-making” and “problem-solving.” (Such simulation-based tests are fraught with difficulties, and inter-disciplinary tests will obscure how well students are doing in actual academic disciples like math and biology.)

Curriculum-content standards are what people in education policy-making call a formal list of topics that teachers are expected to teach and students are expected to learn.  The Council on Foreign Relations report says – in direct contradiction to America’s federal system and the primary responsibility of the states for public education – that “clearly” there cannot be “cannot be different standards and expectations” in “a single country.”

The Council on Foreign Relations calls for the U.S. Defense Department to evaluate and “periodically” review the new national curriculum standards in science, civics, foreign languages, technology, creativity, and problem-solving.  It wants to add federally-run accountability in the form of an annual U.S. Department of Education audit of K-12 public education, to be done in collaboration with the Departments of Defense and State and the U.S. intelligence agencies.  At the same time, the report is careful to add that it opposes releasing information on individual-teacher effectiveness based on student test scores.  (Teacher union leader Randi Weingarten was a member of the Council task force.)

This Council on Foreign Relations proposal sounds like a much more ambitious re-run of the federal foray into K-12 education after the launching of Sputnik back on Oct. 4, 1957.  Sputnik was the first satellite to orbit the earth and it was launched by the Soviet Union, a Communist country and America’s principal international rival in the Cold War. The launch of Sputnik back then was what historian and renowned textbook writer Thomas A. Bailey called “a psychological Pearl Harbor” for U.S. officials and the American public.

Sputnik led Congress to pass the 1958 Na­tional Defense Education Act, which funded programs in math, sci­ence, and Cold-War-related foreign-languages. But such activity did not go unchallenged. Conservatives and libertarians who were strict constructionists complained that when the federal government used conditional grants-in-aid to promote physics and like subjects, the federal authorities were determining the make-up and content of curriculum. These conservatives and libertarians said that the control of curriculum content was the most complete, most thoroughgoing sort of control of education and hence the least desirable sort of control for the federal government to have.

Many conservatives and libertarians — then and now — doubt that the federal government should have an extensive say in the K-12 curriculum in civilian schools in the name of providing for the “common defense.”  Such an extensive say is what the Council on Foreign Relations is proposing.

These conservatives and libertarians say that such a notion is overbroad and hence constitutionally dubious.  If the federal government can sponsor K-12 curriculum in the name of providing for defense, it can do anything in the name of defense, and we no longer — these conservatives and libertarians say — have a federal government of limited powers.

Because of Cold War concerns and as a follow-on to the Sputnik panic, there were numerous federally-funded exemplary K-12 curriculum back in the early 1960s, especially in math and science, but eventually in the social sciences as well. Although creating this new national curriculum and putting it in place were subsided with federal money, the 1960s curriculum was said to be “voluntary” – rhetorical terminology that was frequently used then and is frequently and misleadingly used today by proponents of a national curriculum.

Yet critics back in the 1960s said the federally-sponsored reform was coercive because adoption of these curricula met conditions for eligibility for other federal grants and contracts and districts sometimes adopted them, in historian Jon Schaffarzick’s words, “for fear of losing other federal support.” Making adoption of a national curriculum in effect a necessity to compete for federal grants was a strategy also to be used by the Clinton administration in the 1990s and by the Obama administration today.

While this post-Sputnik national curriculum left a residue of influence in future state and local curricula, it is mostly remembered as an example of federal over-reach and because of the local dissent it provoked.  The New Math curriculum (characterized by set theory, working with numbers in bases other than 10, and formalism) was even satirized for its complexity and difficulty in a song by mathematician and comedian Tom Lehrer.

Historian Diane Ravitch noted that, for a while, “every textbook series” (because of fashion and federal incentives) adhered to the New Math, but teachers “complained that it was too difficult to teach,” mathematicians “found it too abstract,” and parent found it too different from the mathematics they were familiar with.

The 1960s federally-funded middle-school social-studies curriculum produced a hostile reaction in Congress, in part because the National Science Foundation’s efforts to create, support, and publicize this curriculum were seen as crowding out noncompliant private publishers and imposing a uniform curriculum across the country with federal funds. Newspaper columnist James J. Kilpatrick wrote at the time that “once the notion is accepted” that government has legitimate authority “to commission and to subsidize” textbooks in history and social studies, America will have moved “a significant step down the road to 1984” (an Orwellian date that in those days was decades in the future).

When that social-studies curriculum was imposed in West Virginia, it provoked many people in that state to rise in rebellion, in part, because the curriculum taught cultural relativism. As acknowledged by course-developer Jerome Bruner, the children were supposed to come to certain conclusions about social-studies topics through a process in which they were to be manipulated by the curriculum materials and through the efforts of their teacher – an engineering of supposed “discovery” by the children in a “context of problem-solving,” to use Bruner’s own jargon.

Over the next few years, these increasingly unpopular curriculum programs faded from the scene. George Weber of the Council for Basic Education wrote afterwards that when you consider that these innovative national curricula math and in the social studies “not only didn’t deliver what was promised” but instead may well have “even left us worse off than we were before,” there is natural proclivity on the part of the public to say, “We’ve been conned.”

The experience of the attempt to put in place the new national curricula in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the name of national security probably contributed to future skepticism about a federal role in curriculum. The experience in the 1950s and 1960s definitely led to the prohibition of such efforts in federal statutes – prohibitions that the Obama administration has violated in recent years by endorsing national curriculum standards and funding national tests and national curriculum frameworks together with related teaching materials and lesson plans.

What can we learn from what was tried in the name of national security back in the 1950s and 1960s?  What will be the outcome of the current effort at national curriculum in English and math, supported by the Obama administration?  What should we think about the Council on Foreign Relations effort to urge national curriculum standards in science, civics, foreign languages, technology, creativity, and problem-solving?

We can learn from the effort in the 1960s that federally-supported curriculum, once it is in place, is likely to be controversial.  We can learn that federal education programs that look mighty and inevitable can collapse quickly and largely disappear in a few years.  We can learn that even in the height of the Cold War, rhetoric about education and national security could not spin straw into gold.

We are living in Obama era of federal over-reach, and we don’t know how influential these current efforts at federal direction of K-12 curriculum will be.  But the lesson of history is that what looks like a federal educational Juggernaut today can crumble tomorrow.

-Bill Evers

The Times called it a “coveted endorsement”—and indeed it is, no matter how much fun Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich had at poor Eric Fehrnstrom’s expense. (For the record, that same day Fehrnstrom, a longtime Romney advisor, gave a televised interview in which he said “I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign…. Everything changes [when he’s running against Obama]. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”)

Jeb Bush, who has been a tireless education reformer since the mid-nineties, is no Etch A Sketch. (Photo by Rex Sorgatz)

Jeb Bush, who has been a tireless education reformer since the mid-nineties, is no Etch A Sketch. And by coincidence I was lucky enough to spend some time with the popular two-term Florida governor (1999—2007) just last week as partEducation Next’s “Conversation” series with important education reformers (see my conversations with John White, Whitney Tilson, and Chris Cerf). You can read a summary of what he accomplished in Florida here; examples include instituting an A—F school grading system, ending social promotion, rewarding school success with both more funds and more flexibility, and creating a tax credit scholarship program. And it has worked. The state’s fourth graders—a majority of whom are minorities—went from ten points below the national average NAEP score on reading in 1998 to six points ahead of the national average by 2009. Florida’s Hispanic students are now reading as well or better than the statewide average of all students in thirty-one states and its African-American students are reading as well or better than the statewide average in eight states.

It is easy to see why The Economist ran a lengthy story on Bush just a couple of weeks ago, under the headline,

The Floridian school of thought: Inspired by Jeb Bush, more Republicans want to transform the classroom

Through his four-year-old nonprofit, Foundation for Excellence in Education, Bush remains an outsize presence in education reform circles. (Bush had also launched the Foundation for Florida’s Future after losing the 1994 race for Governor. It went dormant while he was Governor and then started up again in 2007 when he left office. It currently lobbies the Florida Legislature, the governor’s office, and the Florida Department of Education on education reforms to build on and protect the policies that were passed while he was in office.)

I watched Bush entertain a delegation of visiting legislators from North Carolina during an informal luncheon at his Coral Gables headquarters, an incisive and expert hour-long primer on building better school systems. What’s the secret, I asked Bush.  “Hard work,” he says. “And you have to be bold.”

Bush’s new foundation is a powerhouse in Florida education reform circles, thanks in large part to a veteran staff directed by Patricia Levesque, Bush’s deputy chief of staff for education while he was governor. And as The Economist suggested, the foundation’s reach is nationwide. (I recommend The Reformer Toolbox.)

As Alyson Klein reported on her Education Week blog,

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the godfather of the reformey-minded Chiefs for Change and an education force in statehouses around the country, has endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for president. That news may be the biggest unsurprise ever to education folks who have been following the campaign.

She notes that former Florida Board of Education Chairman F. Philip Handy is a Romney education advisor and on the board of Bush’s foundation. And Margaret Spellings, President George W. Bush’s former secretary of education, is also on Romney’s team. I guarantee you that if Mitt only half-listens to George W’s brother, the nation’s education prospects will be greatly improved.

- Peter Meyer

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View blog.

Rick Hess: Heather, what’s your role with TFA?
Heather Harding: I am a vice president of research at Teach For America. Our focus is to initiate and help facilitate external partners doing research on the impact of Teach For America. I’m essentially a matchmaker or a conductor for all the folks internally who are working on programs and continuous improvement and the larger research community.

RH: At this point, TFA has been with us for a touch over 20 years. What do we know about TFA at this point? If there are three or four key findings, what are they?
HH: We know that Teach For America is good at identifying the folks who are going to be leaders in a variety of sectors and redirecting their energy towards the education sector. That includes classroom teaching but it also speaks to education leadership, policy, and those sorts of things, with entrepreneurship being a key piece of that. The other thing we know is that Teach For America corps members tend to outperform their peer teachers, both beginning and more experienced, in math and science. And people can quibble because some of those effect sizes are small, but if you look through the trend line over time, even in the early studies, you see this pronounced effect in math and science teaching.

And the third thing that we know is that Teach For America programmatically has made dramatic changes in training and ongoing support that seem to have allowed us to maintain quality as we grow to scale. The difference between training and supporting 500 teachers in the 1990s and 4,000 teachers, 6,000 teachers in the new millennium is [huge]. It’s something that we’ve had to think about; about how to maintain quality over time, in selecting them, training them, and then offering this development program. And we haven’t seen a downward trend in the results on student achievement, so I think you have to believe that we’re maintaining quality and paying attention to continuously improving the model.

RH: Recently, there’s been criticism of TFA’s research record. Philip Kovacs, a professor at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, suggests that we don’t really have much sense of how effective TFA teachers are, that we’re not doing a very good job of understanding their impact, and that we’re paying insufficient attention to the effects of TFA-induced turnover. What are your thoughts on this score?
HH: In the last five years, we’ve been relatively fortunate that, one, there’s been a number of studies mainly coming out of the states with stronger data. So New York has strong data sets [as do] North Carolina, Louisiana, [and] Tennessee. Policy folks and economists interested in teacher quality and teacher effectiveness have [been able to] conduct studies that we’ve been happy to participate in that compare teachers from various sources.

The Kovacs debate is largely one that relies on the peer review process. [Ed. Note: one of Kovacs' criticisms surrounding a study by George Noell and Kristin Gansle of Louisiana State University and hosted by the National Council on Teacher Quality on TFA in Louisiana was that the study was not peer-reviewed.] We think that’s important, but we also think that if you look at the evidence, both peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed [but featuring] a standard methodological rigor, that we see that there’s clearly a pattern that Teach For America corps members achieve academic gains that are equal to or larger to those of other new teachers and, in some instances, more experienced teachers. It’s a small relative advantage, but it does seem relatively clear in math and science and high school…[and] we see that other areas like middle school, English, language arts are slowly catching up. So we feel encouraged.

Many of these studies come out initially in a pilot form or are self-published and then they go through the peer review process. So we see that as important, but academic processes are long and we’re a program that changes our model and tries to make improvements every year. So we want to grab whatever evidence we can. And we also hope that as data systems become stronger, we can have these kinds of studies in every state. We’ve got ones going on right now that we’re collaborating with or participating in Missouri. We’re trying to get one up in Florida. It looks like there’s going to be one in Arizona. We really welcome a lot of activity on this front.

RH: This doesn’t necessarily address the concern that much of this work has not appeared in academic journals or undergone peer review. How do you respond to that concern?
HH: I think that the methodology across [the studies] is very similar. While all of them haven’t been through peer review, I don’t think that they have huge methodological challenges. As you know, there are all kinds of philosophical wars about methodology and, frankly, the relevance of standardized test scores. We think that’s one vehicle to consider our impact. We’d love more studies on different metrics.

One of the things that we don’t necessarily have a lot of control over is what a researcher decides to do with the study that they write. We are supportive of people going through the peer review process…[but] we’re partnering with folks who are going to do research probably with or without us.

RH: Now, how about the critique that the research focuses fairly narrowly on value-added reading and math scores? Kovacs suggests that TFA places a premium on driving those scores, and therefore, while it’s not a surprise that TFA teachers seem to do okay by that metric, it’s unclear whether the students are benefiting to the degree that value-added might imply.
HH: I think we want to know more about how to better study those other things. We’re very interested in that. And in our internal system, we actually use our “teaching as leadership” rubric to test for those things that aren’t necessarily going to show up on a test score. I think where you have a great test you’re going to have good teaching and learning. When you have a not so great test, you might be concerned. So, while we think the tests are telling us something important, we don’t think they’re the only metric out there.

However, the currency of policy research [today] is the test score. That’s really the legacy of NCLB that we all have to live with. It’s not telling us nothing, right? So it’s not a useless exercise to look at the student learning that’s reflected in a test score. I look to the lessons that Louisiana has provided. The state department took the initiative and looked at their teacher prep programs comparatively and used value-added to do that, and then used that information to push back on programs where they were falling down. That’s how we use this information.

That being said, we also look at observational data on teachers. We’re…looking to add some student surveys. We’re interested in all of it. The fact that we have work focused on student test score data doesn’t mean that we are exclusively interested in that. We’re interested in that, no doubt, but we also think you need to get as much information as you can. Test scores don’t really predict [a student's] destiny and their educational opportunities.

RH: Speaking of which, there was a recent debate between two TFA corps members about the whole “locus of control” question and whether TFA’s commitment to having its corps members drive student learning means that TFA can seem dismissive or unaware of the other challenges in children’s lives. How do you think about this challenge when evaluating teacher performance?
HH: Our rubric is more expansive than just measuring students’ learning through test scores. If folks look at our rubric they’ll see that we’re looking at things more holistically…Just in the last year we’ve begun to look at creating a richer portfolio of data that we can collect from teachers about their impact in the classroom. It includes formative assessments, both off the shelf as well as developed by teachers. It includes observational data. In the last year, we’ve incorporated a real shift in language that talks about transformational teaching…that makes a difference on any growth measure that you might select, but that it’s also important for the work we’re trying to do that teachers consider what would put kids on a different life trajectory and what that’s going to mean. So you might imagine that it’s good for kids to know their multiplication tables, but it’s also important for them to understand if they want to be an astronaut or a medical doctor, what would the course sequence look like and can they see themselves filling those roles?

RH: What are a couple current research relationships that TFA is involved with?
HH: We’re in an ongoing relationship with Ed Labs, Roland Fryer’s outfit at Harvard. He has continued to have an interest in how programs can further engage young leaders in education reform. We did two studies that came out over the summer focused on our selection model and on our alumni’s perceptions and their continuation and work in the education sector.

We’re going to continue to look again at selection and, in particular, we’re going to look at how to better screen candidates…We’re also going to do some testing around professional development interventions that seem to make a difference for impact on value-added. We have an ongoing relationship with Monica Higgins, who is looking at our alumni impact, thinking about whether and how our folks become interested in social entrepreneurship and what kinds of things we do or what kind of experiences they have [that prepare them for] those challenges.

We want to know a little bit more about Teach For America’s alumni long-term and their retention in the sector. We have another project that’s looking at the relationship between Teach For America corps members in a school community and the rate at which students in that school apply to more selective colleges. And this work is being done by a young scholar named Jonathan Meer, who is at Texas A&M, along with Caroline Hoxby. It’s not a causal relationship, but the correlation that if you bring in folks who have a higher-profile college experience, that might encourage young people to apply to a wider variety of schools.

RH: If you had to name a couple key research priorities for TFA going forward, what are they?
HH: We want to continue to understand the value added by our teachers in every market. We’re a national program and we have studies that look at the impact on student achievement in about six states. We’re in 30-plus states, so we need these studies all over because our hunch is that the teacher market is different. We want to continue to do that work and find good partners.

We know that a big part of our mission is focused on what alumni do. We have a long way to go to figure out what we mean by leadership in the education sector, so we need to do some internal work, but we also want to keep tracking what our grads do and what our alums do. We’re interested in their role in school leadership and understanding the barriers for them moving forward. I think the Fryer and Higgins studies are really cutting-edge and we want to continue that momentum.

Finally, I would say that we need to start thinking about the macro impact at Teach For America. So what has it meant given that we’re 20 years old? What has it meant for Teach For America to be in the ed reform sector, what’s been the impact on policy, on how we think about what investments to make, and on Teach For America’s impact in communities where we’ve been for 20 years?

RH: There are voices in the education research community who have felt that TFA is not that interested in the traditional education research space. I’m curious whether you think TFA has contributed to that impression and whether you’re interested in working with researchers who are not already partnering with you?
HH: I think that for a long time Teach For America was small enough that helping somebody gather data for a relatively small impact study was not very interesting or didn’t seem like it would be a worthwhile pursuit. I think that we are operating at scale now and there are a lot of opportunities to partner with us and get access to some of the data that we have. We have a robust network of universities that partner with us so that our folks can get certified and get masters degrees. Faculty on those campuses have some advantage in terms of having access to programs. But my team at Teach For America fields all kinds of requests to do research with us and we also go out looking for people to do that kind of work with.

We don’t fund a lot of those activities but we do partner with people to go out and identify funding. I think that’s sometimes been the challenge. We’ve been criticized for not being open, but in my four-year tenure, I think we’ve only said “no” to a couple of proposals that have been presented to us.

RH: If somebody wanted to reach out to you guys, who is the appropriate person to reach out to and what’s the best way to get a hold of them?
HH: On our webpage, on the research section, we have an email address that goes right into our request system. Or people can reach out directly to me: heather.harding@teachforamerica.com.

-Rick Hess

This blog entry also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Behind the Headline
Academic Value of Non-Academics
Education Next | Winter 2012

At a charter school in Washington, D.C., 19 seniors received college football scholarships this year. An article on Grantland looks at how Friendship Collegiate Academy became a football powerhouse. In an article that appears in the Winter 2012 issue of Ed Next, June Kronholz examines the link between afterschool activities and graduating from high school, going to college, and becoming a responsible citizen.

HT: Gotham Schools

Ladd elaborates the BBA theory in a lengthy paper in which she says school reforms—accountability, merit pay, school choice—are nefarious and harmful.  It would be much better, she says, to boost student performance by reducing the “incidence of poverty.”

In my critique of BBA theory, I show that much of the association between family income and achievement is a byproduct of other factors. Income’s causal impact is modest, smaller than the impacts of many reforms now under consideration.

In an ill-considered rebuttal, blogger Valerie Strauss denies that BBA disparages the value of school reform.  She even denies that either BBA or Ladd ever meant to say that income had much of an impact on achievement. She insists “Harvard’s Paul E. Petersen” has “mischaracterized” Ladd’s argument, “accusing her of saying things she didn’t say.”

“There’s no such thing as bad press, as long as they spell your name right,” said circus master P. T. Barnum. So I could have forgiven Strauss her error-prone post had she taken the trouble to figure out how I spell my name.  All Scandinavians may look alike, but Pedersen was the name given to my grandfather in Denmark, and Peterson was the name assigned to me when I was born and baptized, and it remains so on my American Express card to this day, but Petersen I was not, am not, nor will be, despite what Strauss says—not just once but five times within the space of three pages.

Since she can’t get my name right, she’s probably out of whack on other things as well. Let’s see.

Strauss denies that Ladd ever said that “the income of a child’s family determines his or her educational achievement.”  Instead, Ladd “speaks of income as one of many factors that characterize educational disadvantage.  [Ladd’s] entire argument is framed around the issue of economic and other types of disadvantage.”

Strauss even denies that BBA opposes the school reforms on the nation’s agenda.   The coalition, we are told, “doesn’t say schools and teachers shouldn’t be held accountable for how well they do their jobs.  In fact, its mission statement notes that school improvements should continue to be a priority though it doesn’t take sides on what those improvements should be.”

In fact, says Strauss, “there is not a particularly strong casual (SIC!) link between income and outcomes.”  Wow!  Read that sentence again!  If one corrects Strauss’s additional spelling error so it reads “causal,” not ”casual,” then Strauss summarizes  the very argument I am advancing, namely: THERE IS NOT A PARTICULARLY STRONG CAUSAL LINK BETWEEN INCOME AND OUTCOMES.

Does Ladd actually agree that “there is not a particularly strong causal link between income and outcomes?”  I wish that were true, but if that is indeed her belief she has done a fabulous job of hiding it.

Consider the following passage from Ladd’s essay: The “logical policy response [to low performance by students from low-income families] . . . would be to pursue policies to reduce the incidence of poverty….Many considerations…make a compelling case for the country to take strong steps to reduce income inequality.”

If the solution is to reduce income inequality, the cause must be the paucity of dollar bills in the hands of the poor.  There are not many other ways of interpreting the passage above.

Of course, Ladd is too trained a social scientist not to realize she skates on the slimmest of ice when she presses her poverty argument to the extent she has. She is well aware of the research literature that shows little evidence that family income has a large causal impact on student achievement. To protect herself, she refers to “correlation” even in contexts where she is making a strong case for a causal impact.

But that sleight- of-hand fools only those who either want to be deceived or who do not quite understand the meaning of   “correlation” (a relationship which may or may not be causal). Elsewhere, Ladd routinely slips into causal language.  Consider, for example, the passage in which Ladd characterizes school reformers as “deniers” of the “effects of poverty.” Here she makes it absolutely clear she is making causal claims, for if poverty has an effect that is being denied, then poverty must certainly be the cause of that effect.  Or consider the opening paragraph of the BBA mission statement, which claims to have identified “a powerful association between social and economic disadvantage and low student achievement.” How can an association be powerful unless it is causal?  Or consider Ladd’s accusation against school reformers that “denying the correlation is nefarious.”  It could hardly be nefarious if reformers were not ignoring an important cause!

Strauss further denies that BBA says “school choice or school accountability are ‘dangerous.’”  But Ladd, the group’s spokesperson, clearly said the following:  “Current policy initiatives are misguided because they . . . have contributed little—and are not likely to contribute much in the future—to raising overall student achievement or to reducing achievement and educational attainment gaps…. Moreover, such policies have the potential to do serious harm.”

As mothers well know, things that have the “potential to do serious harm” are dangerous, whatever Strauss might say.

Strauss tells us that BBA supports reform.  But Ladd says:  “Evaluations that place heavy weight on student test scores are likely to do more harm than good.”  “Governance changes [such as charters] do little . . . to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children.”  She denounces the “punitive test-based accountability that we now have in this country.”   Ladd concludes: Education reform policies “are not likely to contribute much in the future—to raising overall student achievement or to reducing [gaps in] achievement.”

It is true that BBA does not actually do much to advocate redistribution of income. It is more interested in growing jobs for public sector professionals. But Ladd makes it clear that she would prefer to reduce income inequality.  Alas, she says, it “is not in the cards, at least in the near term…unless the current protests in New York City and elsewhere…[put] income inequality back on the policy agenda.”

So Ladd and her union friends instead propose to fund a host of new social services as well as educational services outside the regular school day, such as summer school, pre-school, and after-school.  All that was done in the 1970s with Medicaid and Head Start and summer recreation programs and much more.  If those programs were the solution, why didn’t they lift the achievement of students from low income families?

A likely explanation is the stark increase in the number of single-parent households, a matter about which Ladd has nothing to say. Nor does Strauss like being reminded of that bitter fact.  “So it’s not apparently consequences of poverty, but the consequences of living with a single parent. Hmmm.”  How are we to translate that hum?  Does Strauss mean to say: “I know you are right, Peterson. If a child does not have two parents, that child is at risk—at risk of poverty and at risk of dropping out of school. But I don’t like your bringing up politically incorrect facts.”

In sum, Strauss denies that BBA and its ranking intellectual leader, Helen Ladd, oppose school reform and think poverty is the root cause of our current educational discontent. If she can deny that, she can deny most anything.

Still,  Strauss does an absolutely superb job of introducing the co-chair of the Broader Bolder coalition as “Helen Ladd, the Edgar T. Thompson Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics at Duke University who has spent years researching school accountability, education finance, teacher labor markets, and school choice.” Despite our disagreements, Ladd remains a good friend, so I do not begrudge any accolade which comes her way.  But if Strauss is inclined to introduce professors fulsomely, she might let her readers know that I am the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, who has spent years researching school governance, school choice, school accountability, and teacher effectiveness rather than referring to me as “Harvard’s Paul E. Petersen.”

But, then, in these days of online erasures, she could just deny she misspelled my name.

-Paul E. Peterson